The September Lectures: The Critical Ontology of Persistence: Lectures Delivered on the Edge of Civilizational and Species Transformation

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1. The Evacuation of the Sacred: Instrumentalization, Modern Consciousness; The Desecration of the Ontological Self to Product (Lecture 9/9/26)

00:00 So I want to talk today about the colonization of capital, and the operative term is going to be instrumentalization. I’m just going to describe this from a biological context up, because the biological context will help you understand how and why this happens politically, culturally. Humanity in many senses is like an unconscious biohazard, for lack of a better word, and I will explain it thusly:

00:30 that the human being, or the human genome, is built to instrumentalize energy. And I’ll just call that thermonuclear energy, right? The energy of the stellar ecosystem, through which —

00:43 And the human being itself, from — you could say — being, or the source, or the field of dynamic information or dynamic energy, is being transformed over massive time scales: hundreds of millions of years, and ultimately billions of years in a cosmic sense. So the human being is an inheritor of a genomic lineage, which we just traditionally call ancestry.

01:12 Our understanding of ancestry is actually very limited, because what it is in reality is the passage, the transmission of genetic information over time, which really is just a biological hard-coding of the manifestation and return of an organism with substantial or not-so-substantial changes that occur into it —

01:38 which is to say, substantial changes would be the opposable thumb or the forebrain. These are paradigm-shifting evolutions, or transmutations, transformations in the genome itself.

01:52 And from there, you also have the sort of generational transformations that occur, and I would call those generational transformations epigenetic inheritances, or epigenetic information.

02:13 And so from that place, you have the primary command — or the two primary commands are survive and reproduce. This is the same for every organism in every degree of sentience.

02:28 The context of the human being is the recursive potentiality of the forebrain to become aware of the operating system under which it conducts its business in the world, right? Being in the world is being in this sphere of various different relationships to this cosmic precept, which I have termed, in my operating manual of being, just persistence: to persist in space and in time. The human body —

02:57 inevitably entropies, decays, organ system failure, et cetera, et cetera. To pass on the human body is the process of reproduction, is passing information forward. And this is the basis of all culture.

03:13 The book, the internet — these are all different sophistications of storing symbolic information, which is produced from the genome. It’s a symbolic redoubling of the genome, because the genome itself is a system of symbols.

03:31 DNA. It is continually attempting to reproduce itself, or persist itself, in space and in time. And degrees of consciousness obviously assist in this process, because if you’re able to become aware of that operating system, then you can act within it consciously. So the issue here — and this is going to bring me back to the term instrumentalization, because this is where it’s critical.

03:59 In space and in time, we develop patterns of behavior, systems of behavior really, which are neurologically encoded at the base level into the foundations of the organism through the genome, but then furthermore perpetuated over space and time due to the nature of having to survive in space and in time, which is to persist the organism energetically.

04:27 These patterns of behavior all themselves can be filed under this larger operating order of survive and reproduce. And when I say survive and reproduce, that means instrumentalize the natural energetic ecosystem around oneself to allow for the circumstances of persistence to come into being. So this is what you think of as — you can say animal competition, human behavior, animal behavior — it all just is filed under this basic,

04:57 supra-cosmological precept of persistence. So when you get down into the cultural and the political, which is kind of my topic of the day — which is the colonization of capital — it’s just a natural outcropping from this source operative imperative. Once you see and you understand this operating principle of existence as persistence, and what is required to persist in space and in time, being metabolic

05:27 in the nature of the organism or the cell, and fusional or thermonuclear in the case of the star or the galaxy — the organizing principle of gravity itself, in a local sense in the solar system, is dependent upon the survival of the star. Otherwise the order, the ecological order of the solar system collapses, right? Because these planets are all following the path of the star through space.

05:57 And the star is following an even deeper path, of a hotter density, a deeper density, which we believe to be a supermassive black hole. So —

06:10 This is the way in which all life bends. This is like the bend — it’s like the gravity of ontology, so to speak. So when you look around and you see flowers bending towards the sun, in a way that perhaps it’s not so linear, right? These are not linear pathways, so to speak. They’re relationships in space and time depending upon energetic persistence. And this is really critical, because when you look at history, there’s an attempt to linearize history: it’s because this, then that, then this,

06:40 then that sort of logic pathway. And this is true to a certain extent, but the reality is the complexity of energetic relationships are —

06:53 I want to say, not so nominal, if that makes sense. That it’s not so one-to-one-to-one. It’s a distribution of forces acting in space and time, against and with one another, depending on supposed benefit. So you can file this under culture, you can file this under religion, you can file this under ideology.

07:15 You can file this under the name of a corporation, right? And this is where the absurd creeps in. These are all standing-order attempts to institute an ecology of individual persistence. Whether that’s through belief, through reproduction, furthering the legacy of a family, right? This is very medieval, so to speak, this concept of the legacy of the royal family, and the royal family itself being deserving of a certain

07:42 behavior or treatment whatsoever, and so forth. This could be through the logic of empire, elevating certain castes or races of individuals above others. It’s nonsense. But the nonsense seeks to serve this basic survival principle again, right? So these are the narratives of humanity, which themselves are nothing more than a thinly veiled, ludicrous, and absurd attempt to institute this paradigm of survival logic.

08:12 And this is where we get to the colonization of capital, when we follow this survival logic through history and through time. And we see these empires which colonize and enslave, right? It’s just the repetition of history,

08:23 and the failure of all revolutions ultimately — because, as Dostoevsky says, it’s a deeper evil, quote unquote, than a socialist physician can diagnose. And what he’s saying there is that the reason why these things keep happening, right, the recurrence of history, which Marx somewhat understands but not really — Dostoevsky, I think, understands it at a deeper level — is that the recurrence of history is not a product of culture or belief. It’s at a deeper level, from which culture and belief emerge, which is human behavior,

08:53 which is the hard-coded biology of the organism, right? The hard-coded genetic biology of the organism unto energetic persistence, which unifies the human being with the star and the cell, and ultimately even the stone upon which the human being carves. These are all attempts to persist as being itself. Otherwise the bottom falls out; there is non-being. Or at least non-localized being.

09:23 Localized being is what we perceive of as being an organism: hands, feet, eyes, et cetera. So the logic of capitalism is just a perfect downstream transformation.

09:40 I believe it’s Locke who talks about rational self-interest. I’m not a theorist of capitalism, I don’t care, so it’s something that I vaguely remember. But one of the theorists of capitalism and self-serving rationalism, right — which all of this kind of philosophy is nothing more than an unconscious biological regurgitation.

10:00 This self-serving rationalism, I guess it’s the Enlightenment era of thought, which is conventionally considered to be liberal, is just a continuation of this unconscious energetic process unfolding. What we’re talking about is a species that has no idea what it’s doing or why it’s doing it. It’s doing it within the context of the doing, and thus is totally blind to its operative principles,

10:26 from which you have the natural outcropping, right? We’re not actually questioning the pursuit of self-interest, which we perceive of as self-interest, which is really nothing more than what we think we desire, right? So this unfolding in history — I mean, everything from slavery to empires to the trade of spices — this is the infrastructural unfolding of human history.

10:56 And the issue here is — I’ll get into this in terms of native ecologies, especially when you look at Native American ecologies, Aztec ecologies, certain African ecologies, as well as, you could even say, a Taoist ecology — is that these are ecologies which

11:19 exist in a different relationship to consciousness. So when we conceive of the human being, right, in a materialist sense, we’re looking at the body being the being, right, or the body’s imperatives being the being. And this is a hyper-local being,

11:36 individual being. And the survival, the pleasures, the concerns, the desires, the trivialities of this being ultimately are the sphere of the world, and the sphere of the self’s relationship to the world. This is a modern Western perspective which has developed in relationship to, I would say actually, the principles of being human as existing in space and in time. So it’s a logical, rational order of being.

12:02 But to perceive of a non-logical, non-rational, non-linear order of being is to actually appeal to the principles which I would say, in a blanket sense, were formerly colonized by this Western ecology of instrumentalization, which we now see as the factory town of the world and the slum of the world, which is entirely interested only in the production of

12:28 perceived product, perceived surplus value — which in reality, I’ll explain in a minute, is nothing more than the extraction of value being justified economically and in market terms as profit for a very small group of people. But in reality what it is doing is it’s just draining the environment. And this is the birth of venture capital.

12:53 To perceive of a global ecology in which the self is intertwined with a multinational, even cosmological, principle of being is closer to the scientific truth of reality.

13:09 Right. And the issue is, in terms of a Western dogma or a Western idea of the self, the self has been narrowed and constricted into the perceived existence of the individual, which is nothing more than the biological hard-coding of the genome to persist and survive in an ecosystem — which is to survive, reproduce, consume energy. But this positing of the self, right, which has become increasingly narrow, increasingly constricted and concrete, with everything from surveillance technology to artificial intelligence

13:39 to the institution of the corporation as the individual — we see a historical transformation.

13:49 We see a historical movement into the human being and away from the cosmological being itself. And this is what Heidegger describes as the crisis of modernity, and the need for poets in modernity. We listen to a corporate figure espouse the virtues of capital.

14:07 But what we’re hearing is the logic of colonialism. We’re hearing the logic of instrumentalization of nature and of other human beings to achieve the perceived meaningful ends of survival and persistence of an individual. And this logic — the human being exists effectively in two spheres, and this is why the understanding of shamanism is so important. A primer on that could be anything by Eliade.

14:37 Understanding of the shaman as one who moves between two modes of being, which is to say the local and the global: the passage from the local organism into a global sphere of consciousness, which is to say cosmological being.

14:53 What we’ve moved away from — and when we talk about the desecration of the sacred, that’s one of my favorite terms to use — the death of the shaman, or the death of the medicine person, the death of the person who exists in a community to travel between these two worlds of perception of self. The shaman or the medicine person can just as easily be an individual with their own personal desires, et cetera, et cetera, but also exist in relationship to cosmological being, which is the ecosystem,

15:23 existence itself, as the operating principle of reality — which is to say, all beings

15:31 attempt to persist, attempt to continue to exist within this larger energetic sphere of relations: everything from the solar to the galactic to the universal, all the way down to the cell, the plant, the animal, the human being. This sphere of relationship is the shaman’s relationship to the animal, the shaman’s relationship to the plant, the shaman’s relationship to the environment. And this is a highly permeable state of being, because this self does not exist in this constrained Western teleology of

16:01 survive, reproduce as an individual. And these convictions are very easy to manufacture. I would already say that the shamanistic or the medicine mode is something that is already very much so neurologically exclusive terrain. It’s not a common human condition to be able to access that space — at least not regularly,

16:23 or without substantial plant medicine, these kinds of things. This is already a marginalized space. It’s already a marginalized place of access. But formerly, the shaman or the medicine person held a position of societal or communal authority, as in being the one who communicates with the gods, which is simply to say the sphere of cosmological relationships, or the form of higher being in which the human being is a manifestation of the larger continuum.

16:53 But the death of this shaman and the medicine person, and the rise of colonialism and capitalism as an increasing economic force — which I’m just calling fascism, because it’s speed, efficiency, and instrumentalization of all things. There is no human being in a fascist ecosystem. There is only material, product, energy, and the transformation that must occur to generate desired outcomes.

17:20 And this is why people will say, in a modern capitalist space, sociopathy, psychopathy, narcissism — these are all terms that are just thrown out without understanding the larger transpersonal transformation, the deep-time transformation that’s occurring in the change. It’s an ontological change from the prioritization of and relationship with being itself. Again, why Heidegger is so important,

17:46 because Heidegger identifies this in the 1930s in Germany as one of the peaks of this transformative process unfolding before his eyes: the institution of the nation of Germany. Germany was not even prior a nation.

18:00 A gathering together of the Volk, so to speak.

18:04 He’s watching this transformation, which is a deep ontology diagnosed by Nietzsche decades earlier as the death of God, which is to say the desacralization of the sacred, the removal of the sacred from the terrain of human experience, and the institutionalization of fascist economics, which is capitalism, colonialism, and the generation of perceived profit. And this is why we need to talk about profit. And this is why it’s so important, because market logic is at the bottom of this. Market logic is the supposed material

18:34 manifestation of the ontology of colonial capitalist individualism, which is to say the furthering of my form. And when we talk about a narcissistic society, or the failure of relationships, or the destruction of global partnerships, right — which is communication, sharing, these understandings that are much more so

19:03 global, relational, interrelated networks and nodes of being, not just a single source of being — simultaneously, it is ontological, but it manifests itself in monotheism, which is to say the one God, and it manifests itself in capitalism, which is to say for the individual benefit, and then obviously all the philosophies that unfold around it.

19:28 You’re taking the cart for the horse, or you’re taking the tree for the forest, or whatever the metaphor is, to believe that any of those one things is not reducible to this higher ontological throwing the baby out with the bathwater — which is to say throwing the sacred out with quote-unquote pre-modernity. So I hope I’m explaining this well. I think it’s easier to see.

19:53 Because what I’m describing is a systemic change. It’s a global ontological change in perception, in orientation. So to orient oneself towards McDonald’s, destroying the rainforest, building a multinational, multibillion-dollar corporation, is necessarily to orient oneself away from relation,

20:15 which is relationship to being — anything from the meditation under the tree which produces Newton’s realization of gravity, or the meditation under the tree which produces Buddha’s realization of enlightenment, right? These being present. This is why Heidegger talks so much about the poets. But this activation

20:37 of the concept and the sphere of the individual, which is a profound — if you consider it, it’s a profound death fear, survival fear at the level of the organism. And you trace that back and you say, okay, there must have been — not that I was alive to know it, or any of us were — a profound delocalization of the experience of the sacred in time, which I would perceive to be technological.

21:04 The founding through experimentation of technological innovation, which I would call even just the form of writing — there’s some great work on this, I think, by Walter Ong — the form of writing itself is an externalization of consciousness, and you see this in Homer:

21:21 the grappling of Homer’s characters, and I think Homer’s very being, with this concept of externalizing thought, that the characters in the Odyssey and the Iliad hear gods speaking to them. And there are arguments that have been made that I would be tempted to agree with, that this is the origination of the realization of thought occurring, the actual perception. This is an acculturation to the forebrain.

21:49 If you understand this capacity for reflective thought instituted in the technological revolution of the genome — like, just as we have the opposable thumb or the forebrain — the possibility of this coming into being, and then the being or the organism itself retroactively has to come to terms with the technological evolution or revolution that has emerged from the unconscious survive-and-reproduce mechanism, which is the natural

22:19 homo sapiens, and I would say even homo universal, biological, genetic, energetic code — which is again the ontology of persistence, to continue to exist by consumption of energy, transformation of energy. But the transformation of energy is itself the ontology of the Tao, right? Again, to understand that the ontology of certain Native American tribes, the ontology of the Aztecs,

22:48 that this transformative principle is itself thus conceived of as the self. And this is why the shaman holds the position of arbiter, or the one who understands, the one who forms the sphere of cosmological relationships within which the tribe operates. This is why Percy Shelley says poets are the unacknowledged legislators.

23:16 [pause]

23:32 So when Shelley says this, what Shelley is doing is, unknowingly — and this is why I think Shelley is really the person who stands most critically at the transformation of modernity. Obviously in the British Empire in the early 1800s, with everything that comes with that, Shelley is standing in the midst of this massive, massive pivot, which is really turning the lights on in modernity, really in a literal, industrial way.

24:00 When we think of the light bulb, when we think of the factory, and when we think of the increasing efficiency of industrial as well as plantation exploitation in the United States — Shelley is standing on the cusp of this.

24:44 So he’s standing at the cusp of this, and he’s actually regurgitating, I think, unconsciously, because Shelley himself, to me, is a shaman or a medicine person. And he’s doing the same kind of work that Nietzsche does several decades later.

24:59 But he’s doing it without the cultural or the civil, the ecological mooring of a tribe that understands. I mean, the [pagan] Britain is totally gone at this point, right? This is colonial empire based around trade, with all of its fancy politics and bureaucrats and parliaments, all of which mean nothing.

25:21 They have no relationship to being. They have relationship to production and consumption, which is to say they are energetically allied with the most subconscious forces at work in nature. Shelley, being a genius of the first order — not only ontologically, but poetically and creatively — is functioning like a siren in the midst of all of this, just going off, so to speak, and saying: we’ve totally lost here, we’ve lost our way.

25:48 We’ve lost the sacred. We’re in a period of profound desecration. We’re not listening to the poets. We’re not listening to the shamans or the medicine people. We have no ecology of being. All that we have is an ecology of survival, and thus an ecology of destitution. And of course Shelley is profoundly incompatible with this, as is Blake, right?

26:11 In the British Empire, they’re both doing the same thing. They’re railing against this civilizational heel turn, which is the death of the relationship. And this is what is traditionally called pagan. And the reason for this — and it’s defiled or desecrated as such — because what it is, is a perception of a sphere of multiplicities of relationships. And those are even constituted in pagan orders of gods,

26:35 right, such as the Greek orders of gods or the Hindu orders of gods. There’s such a multiplicity of gods because there is an understanding that the emanation — which in the Hindu sense would be Krishna — there’s an emanation down, and this emanation down produces a profound diversity. And this is constituted in a Christian sense in terms of the angelic order, but

26:58 this transformation is not thoroughly accomplished, because these gods have profound purposes, relationships, functions, and powers. This is why I talk about the powers in my poetic works. But none of these gods is instrumental, so to speak. I want to try to explain that.

27:25 When we are instrumentalizing as human beings — you can even think of this in terms of romantic relationships, business relationships, friendships, or nature itself — the instrumental relationship is a relationship of use,

27:40 consumption for purposes, right? Means and ends. And this is, I think, pretty well philosophically documented in the nonsense that passes for most philosophy in the period between the Greek and the modern. Why? Because it’s all concerned with human beings: what human beings want, what human beings utilize, what human beings rationally think. It’s meaningless. And the reason for this is that we —

28:09 Again, it’s the kind of cultural narcissism that is discussed. The loss of the sacred is the introduction of the individual self as the primary operating mode. It is the descent into the genome. We call this — in Christianity it’s called the Fall, or it’s called Lucifer. It’s the falling into the forgetting of God.

28:31 And that’s nothing more or less than the forgetting of the primordial ontological condition and circumstances of the self, which the shaman has explicit access to, returns to the tribe with, and that is then incorporated as the cosmological operating system in which the tribe conducts its affairs. But the death of the shaman — and this is Nietzsche’s siren song with Zarathustra: Nietzsche comes back to the village and the village is like, what are you talking about?

28:59 That is the death of the organizing principle of humanity. So when we ask that and we say, okay, there’s all of these downstream effects that come with the falling into this base nature, which is kind of — it’s a Babylon in many ways, right? A Sodom and Gomorrah. This is described very well in these kinds of ancient texts in relationship to the death of civilizations, or the fall of Rome. These destitutions occur

29:26 precisely because of the loss of the ontological guide, the loss of the compass, the cosmic or cosmological compass of being in which human beings formerly navigated. But the abasement of that is the descent into this primordial operator. And that is the exception,

29:52 or the specialty, of the shamanic or the medicine figure: that this figure does not exist within the code of the human being. Right? And this is where it gets strange, is that it’s a different neurological configuration, with different access in terms of consciousness to being itself. And this is conceived of, in the modern sense, with all of the delusions

30:19 of grandeur, the presumptions of pure empty materialism, which are the dogma of the fallen age, right — that this method of existence or method of being is schizophrenic, or insane, or

30:40 broken, I don’t know, whatever. And so this is why you see someone like Artaud in the 1940s and ‘50s in an asylum. Because he is a Frenchman who flees to Mexico

30:57 to attempt to reengage — consciously or unconsciously, he has a realization that Mexico is not entirely abandoned, even with the Christian colonial mission. And he has this profoundly disturbed relationship with the symbol of Christ, to being itself, to existence itself. And he goes, and I believe he undergoes an ayahuasca ritual or a peyote ritual — I’m forgetting which one.

31:26 [pause]

31:52 So, I have documented this very, very thoroughly, and it’s a lineage that I’ve included. Rimbaud. I mean, this is why it comes back to the poets. I have Lispector in there as well. Because what it is, is it’s a return, in this Western instrumentalized, really ontologically broken world. And you see this descent into chaos and hell,

32:13 which is undergone forcibly, I think, because of the ignorance, right? I think there’s a series of political relationships, right, power relationships, that come with the turn towards instrumentalization. And again, this is why colonialism is so important, and this is why slavery is so important, because we’re looking at the instrumentalization of human beings and the instrumentalization of nature to achieve ends which create power systems. And what are power systems but energetic systems

32:43 of production and consumption? So when we’re talking about a plantation, we’re talking about a slave ship, we’re talking about produced ecologies, right? Manufactured, imagined ecologies, which generate energy at unnatural levels and in unnatural ways to benefit small groups of people, and rely upon exploitation.

33:10 Think about the different forms of capital which have unfolded over time since then. And the people who participate in and uphold these systems — Shelley’s mortal enemies, so to speak, which are these politicians and these bureaucrats of the British Empire, the same ones that Blake mocks, the same ones that Artaud rails against in France.

33:38 These are the people who have made this turn, right? Artaud’s relationship to Christianity is fascinating in terms of, like, God and the devil and Christ, because what he’s observing — and it’s very hard for him to articulate this, and Gogol ultimately commits suicide because of this, in my opinion; Mayakovsky also commits suicide because of this — it is the attempt to bridge

34:04 or reband these two fundamental forces that are in opposition to one another. The forces of the ontology of capital, or the ontology of colonialism, which is the force of extraction, manipulation, and exploitation, which is really just a continuation of unconscious nature. And the Promethean force within man, which I would say is the force of genius: the force of poetic genius, the force of ontological genius,

34:30 the force of shamanic and medicine consciousness, which is the grasping of the true cosmic ecology and the conception of the self in this order, where this way of being is substantially higher. It’s broader. It incorporates more. It’s inclusive. And so I have this pretty profound, I think,

34:53 discursion between these two modes, which are really just integration and fragmentation as forces at work within being at any given moment in time. And it’s somewhat Hegelian.

35:05 Because the attempt, right — there’s these forces of — when we’re talking about integration, we’re talking about something like Spinoza, the concept of the monad, Leibniz as well. These are, I think, profoundly neurologically different, profoundly gifted forces and figures in human history, who grasp the

35:34 ontological locus, or the center of being, the centrifugal force of being, and see it manifest everywhere, and thus have a deeper identification of self because of it. This is it. This is a native cosmology — and when I say native, I mean primordial, ancient — because the political relationship of the shaman or the medicine person was prioritized.

36:01 So the introduction, or the institution, of power relationships in civilization,

36:10 which really is the birth, I would say, in many ways, of civilization itself — because what is civilization other than a hierarchy of political power?

36:23 This method of organization is a desacralization, precisely because it verticalizes relationships. And this is precisely what we see in colonial imperial modernity,

36:44 in terms of political power, but also racial and class hierarchies, et cetera, et cetera. It is the justification that one being or one organism is substantially different than the other, for whatever manufactured reason or purpose, and thus has priority in regards to sustenance or survival. And this is the foundation of the concept of profit,

37:08 because if we can go into the rainforests and destroy the rainforests and say the rainforests are not sentient, or the rainforests are a second-order form of being, or the rainforests are not conscious, the rainforests are not part of our global ecology — they only become part of our ecology when they start to benefit the self, right? This is the destruction of our world, but it’s entirely due to ignorance and the death of the shaman or the medicine person.

37:35 And this is what I mean by instrumentalization, because a shamanic or medicine consciousness cannot instrumentalize. It’s not possible. Because in the attempt to instrumentalize, what you’re doing is you’re literally taking a piece of your body, right, your actual being — right, this is the expanded shamanic mode of consciousness — and subjecting it to abuse or exploitation.

38:02 And in the world of debased or desacralized modernity, which is the absolute materialization of all forms, the presupposed emptiness of all forms, and the subjection of those forms to energetic consumption at will —

38:19 there is no ontological law of the sacred. There is only what is, in human law, acceptable or not acceptable to do, and that can obviously be changed depending on who it benefits. So when you live in such a desacralized world, in a completely instrumentalized world, what you’re living in is entirely a product of the logic of fascism, which is born out of the death of shamanic or medicine consciousness as the cosmological orienting and organizing force

38:48 of existence for any society or civilization or tribe. So what we now live in is the global institution of this ontology as the primary order. And this is — it’s not only, it’s not even the belief system. It’s the perpetuation — and I’ll take it back to the biology to kind of wrap this up — it’s the perpetuation of the basest

39:09 manifestation of the human being, which is to say: you exist only to serve yourself as an organism, to survive, reproduce, to perpetuate yourself in space and in time, to persist. It is the most constricted, constrained, narrowed form of the vision of existence possible. And within that vision of existence there is only instrumentalization, because all things should be, could be, and are used to perpetuate the self as a

39:36 closed organism. It’s not even true in an entropic or thermodynamic sense. It’s a pseudo-closed system. Energy and heat are always escaping. That’s why death occurs. So when you have this falsely manufactured vision of the self, which is extremely narrowed and extremely ignorant, and a product entirely of the turn of Western philosophy after the Greeks — which is really just a turn of the ontology of power, which is the willful destruction of the sacred to manufacture power

40:06 in a modern global sense, willful destruction of the sacred. And then there’s the complaint about the evacuation of the sacred. You have evacuated yourself, because you’ve turned away from it. So when such an operation happens,

40:26 there is no more sacred world to live in, if you can understand that. There is no place in which the sacred exists, because the literal ontological code of being, as it manifests itself in terms of the world and world relationships, has been changed. And it has been lowered, debased towards this

40:49 primal animal level of existence and survival. Whereas the concept of the sacred operative in everything from the Native American treatment of the bison, to even the Aztec human sacrifice, to the concept of the Tao, right, or the force that moves through all things — these are not operative strata or levels of consciousness or perception that are available in the modern world. So when you have a Shelley, or you have an Artaud,

41:17 or you have even Emily Dickinson, you have these perspectives or these consciousnesses that are really shamanic and medicine consciousnesses, that exist within a world that has abandoned

41:31 or lost their function, disabused it, and even defiled it, in the name of what these people inevitably end up railing against — first and foremost Shelley and Artaud — which is to say the culture of capitalism, which is the logic of capitalism, which is the ontology of instrumentalization. And this is perceived of as, interestingly enough, in modernity, advancement, progress, right?

41:59 Which is kind of hard to understand. Because if you perceive this ontological position of an extremely closed and constricted, death-fearing self as progressive, what you have is a backwards ontology of formerly, in a primordial — and you could even say, I guess what I would say is a —

42:28 I guess I was gonna say, you could even say a pagan vision of the world, which is to say an ancient vision of the world. This vision of the world is a cosmological one,

42:40 and the boundaries of the self in this cosmological vision of the world, as it is instituted by shamanic or medicine figures throughout each of these separate regional and local cultures. And it’s no coincidence that they’re all kind of saying the same thing, because these visions, these cosmologies, are emerging from the same type of person. They’re the scribes of these cultures and civilizations, these people who neurologically, genetically, biologically are built in such a way

43:09 that their vision and experience of reality is extremely permeable. They’re experiencing consciousness not as a local phenomenon, but as a global and a cosmological phenomenon. And they’re experiencing the existence of being, energy, as such.

43:25 So the loss of such an ontology —

43:36 the loss of this — is where we are.

43:42 And this is, again, right, the concept of power in these cultures is entirely different. So when we talk about the institution of colonialism and power relations, empire relations, we’re talking about that crux being — I guess you could say civilizational or political power — which is instrumentalization, not only of individuals, but of nature: the colonization of the shamanic function

44:12 as the organizing principle. So in the world we live in now, this hyperspeed, really, of just nonsense, right? It’s just energy moving faster, people becoming more desperate, power relations becoming more ridiculous and absurd and blown out, false emperors, false kings, et cetera, whatever. It’s all been false, but it’s been false at the level of the ontological turn that happened hundreds of years ago, even thousands, you could say.

44:42 Because even in terms of Heraclitus or Diogenes, these power relationships were obviously still in existence — Alexander the Great, et cetera. The issue is: what is the organizing principle? This returns us to Shelley: poets are the unacknowledged legislators.

45:03 And this is a choice that human beings make, and are making, in any given moment. And the failure of humanity is ultimately a failure at the most primal level, or primordial level, at the level of the organism — the neurological organization of the organism to be able to grasp reality in a sophisticated way

45:23 that is not limited to merely the local, superficial satisfaction of a temporary pseudo-individual organism, which is just a manifestation of a phase, a brief development in the long history of consciousness and unconsciousness, and the battle between these two forces. But that is really the first failure. And again, that’s what we experience when I’m talking about this trickle-down effect of the genome, or persistence. It’s not to say that persistence, survival, and reproduction

45:53 are irrelevant. It’s just to say that they are the basic, the most basic functions. And that a civilization or society or species organized around those functions is not long for the world, because it will destroy itself to persist, right? Because it is so afraid, it is so death-anxious, it is so

46:17 viciously self-contained. All that it is, is the littlest, smallest version of itself, and it looks around and all it sees around itself is just emptiness and void and non-existence, because it has no cosmological, ontological relationship to being itself. It is the being that is divorced from God. And so you have these actually very, very sophisticated ancient technologies, through ritual, through symbol, right? You could say ancient Egypt is a great example

46:45 of relationship to the sacred, which is to say the self as the principle of transformation — not the self always at risk of being overtaken by the principle of transformation. So understand, this is a smaller vision of the human, but with technological advancement — I mean everything from AI to the nonsense of corporations and faster movement, of convenience — modernity convinces itself that it is the superior manifestation of humanity.

47:13 What absurdity, right? But again, this is the exercise of empty material political power. And when I say empty, I mean emptied of the sacred, emptied of any sort of meaning or ontological purpose or real ground within being itself, which is to say the transformative principle. Entirely unconscious, entirely vicious, entirely death-anxious, right?

47:34 So this is what is at work in the modern world. And the product that we get from it is nothing. And this is the hilarious hypocrisy and oxymoron of profit: that all of this anxiety about the production of profit, or the production of value, or the production of money, is nothing. It gives us ontologically nothing. What it does is, it may carve out a brief sphere of survival.

48:00 Maybe the conditions of that survival, in a purely empty material sense, are slightly better. But what we get in terms of real meaning and real relationship to being itself — which is to say real relationship to ourselves — is nothing. Absolutely nothing. It’s entirely empty. But

48:18 we take these little stakes, and these themselves are supposed grand civilizational meanings. And this is the profound poverty of modernity. This is what happens when the sacred has been emptied. This is what Heidegger exists at — really at the final death knell of, in Nazi Germany. And he’s proclaiming this because he realizes with horror that what is being done has already effectively been done, and it’s the last couple of, like, little chess pieces being moved around on the board.

48:47 And this is the conviction, right? This is the ludicrous hilarity of the belief that technology — which is to say the acceleration of the false ontology of capitalism or colonialism, which is instrumentalizing everything: human being, nature, creation, anything, immediately instrumentalized, immediately converted into a value — that doing that faster is actually going to help you

49:11 or get you into the place that you actually want to be, which is an intimate relationship to existence itself, tuned in to the infinite, so to speak. No, no. And this is what the shamanic and the medicine — right, I mean, which is literally a different neurological configuration — exists beyond, and always has. But the problem is, right, is that human beings as a species have allowed this supplantation and this power relation to

49:41 become not only dominant but predominant in a global sense, right? Whereas maybe before it might have been regionally dominant, in terms of the age of empires, or right? And this is a real choice, because at the end of the day it is what constitutes our relationship to self in the world, right? It’s who we listen to, it’s what we think is true. And there’s really two perspectives at the end of the day. I will make it black and white, because it is.

50:11 There is the perspective of integration, which is the shamanic perspective, which is to say the monad, or the manifestation of all of these different forces in relationship, in a non-hierarchical sense, in terms of exchange. And then there is the precept of disintegration, which is fascist capitalism, total instrumentalization to serve the purpose of the manufactured or imagined individual. And people will say the shamanic position is

50:40 just highly creative nonsense. I’ll turn and say the capitalist perspective is highly creative nonsense, because you have to be so incredibly creative, so incredibly fearfully creative, to manufacture such a positive image of the self: the name, the number, the role, all of your different history that you protect and guard with your life, and your vision of yourself and your family. It’s one of the most creative acts available to a human being. But that is precisely what

51:11 the species has fallen into.

51:17 And that’s really what the first colonization is. Because when you look at England, or you look at these colonial empires, Spain — these all emerge from a pagan consciousness. So when we talk about the movement between pagan consciousness and monotheistic consciousness, we’re talking about a movement from a horizontal vision of reality to a vertical vision of reality. You can understand this as the cross. The vertical vision of reality is the spirits and

51:46 et cetera, et cetera. And the horizontal vision of reality is the impoverished world. So you develop a theology of the evacuation of the sacred, and this is not primary. This is not actually an evolution of cosmology, or an evolution of spiritual intuition. It is primarily a political move, a power move, to institute and create power relationships in space and in time.

52:13 The concept of the king is directly derived from the concept of the god — the God, the only God.

52:23 I don’t want to complicate this too much, because it’ll get very theological and it doesn’t need to be, because theology is basically irrelevant to what we’re talking about.

52:35 That is the loss of the sacred, which is the loss of the shamanic and the medicine consciousness, which is what the world is crying out for. But it’s the same reason it doesn’t get heard in the modern world: because it can’t be instrumentalized. It’s not a profit generator. It’s not economically viable. The only thing it is, is cosmologically, ontologically integrated.

52:58 We don’t have a context for that. There is no place for that to go. It’s not academic, it’s not bureaucratic, it’s not political, it’s not based on power relations, it’s not based on control, it’s not based on celebrity. It’s based on the articulation and coexistence with and into reality itself as a cosmological ecosystem:

53:21 being itself. This is not something that can be extracted. There’s nothing other than being. You can’t extract being from being. It’s irreducible.

53:31 But this is precisely what humanity has been viciously and ferociously starved of. And it has been replaced with these propagators of desires. You could call them charlatans, vaudeville characters, salesmen of mineral water, so to speak. It’s a total comedy and it’s a total farce. Because all that these people are doing — all of them, they’re all doing the same thing — selling you something that will reintroduce you to the sacred.

53:58 And that is already impossible. It’s already a broken deal.

54:03 Because being cannot be broken off and sold to being. But that’s what all of this is. It’s a remixing of the fallen, shattered glass of a civilization which has already broken its ontological contract, which is the contract of being with itself, in a delusional — this is what the Christians call satanic — kind of satanic or Luciferian deal or bargain,

54:26 which is to say: we’re going to create this mechanism of profit, which is a mechanism of economic power and control. We’re going to subject ourselves to the tyranny of this, which is the tyranny of slavery, plantation economics, labor slavery, factory workers. We’re going to create these ecosystems of profound terror and exploitation to elevate the circumstances of a select few, and we will call that progress. Think about that from an ontological perspective:

54:58 that that itself — the institution of these terror relationships, these death relationships — being progress. Because it generates the illusion of capital, the illusion of profit, which is nothing more than extraction and exploitation for the benefit of another individual who is operating under this base ontology of consumption and reproduction.

55:22 So when we talk about the meaning of human life, this is really what we’re talking about. Because if that is the predominant ontology, human life is meaningless. Human life has nothing more than consumption and reproduction, and it’s just pure survival, which means humanity itself as an evolutionary species has failed, or is failing. We’re just not there yet. The other method, right —

55:45 relationship to the sacred, or relationship to being itself as a sphere of cosmological relationships, tuning into that — is really the only thing we have available to ourselves. We have this relationship to being itself, or we have nothing. And this is why, again, I don’t really go for the gray area here, because there isn’t any. That relationship is either present and organizing our experience, or it isn’t, which means we’re desperately attempting to get back to it.

56:15 And that is all that we experience in this world. It is people selling you something that they’re telling you, in your desperation, will get you back to where you want to be, where you need to be, where you always really were — but for the institution of this profoundly corrupt ontological and ideological turn, which is the ship of modernity steering wildly off track into an iceberg. And what we see as the destruction and calamity around us every day is the failure of relationship to the sacred,

56:42 because that relationship itself will be the primary arbiter of all decisions and actions and behaviors. And it is actually a higher relationship to being. People will say human nature is just to exploit and control and consume and reproduce. That is the lowest relationship possible to being, because it’s slavery to the genome. It’s a slavery to human biology, which is past tense.

57:05 Present and future tense is understanding the history of the development of the human being and existing in acknowledgment of that, but moving towards a real relationship to that which we are beneath the programming. Right? Because that programming itself is not actually what we are. People will say that’s what the human being is, biology and the genetics or whatever. It’s such a shallow vision of the self, and it’s due entirely to ignorance and stupidity.

57:36 And those are our guides today. Those are our media figures, those are our cultural figures, those are our political figures. And the reason why they are our guides is because they’re viciously, unabashedly afraid, and they court power like fiends. And in our ignorance and foolishness and gullibility, we’ve allowed these people to take center stage in our culture and our civilizations, make our decisions, and tell us who we are, what we should do, what we should want, and who we should be.

58:05 And that’s the farce. That’s Gogol. And Gogol is tortured at the end of his life by a priest who told him his stories were sinful, or whatever. But really, all that they were was just saying: Russia is hypocrisy. Russia has no relationship to God, even though all the time they’re saying they are. They have no relationship to the sacred. It’s an entirely power-corrupt, lustful, and broken society.

58:28 That’s what a prophet is; that’s the historical function of prophecy. And the prophet is intimately aligned with the tradition of the shaman or the medicine person, because they see the cosmological relationship, the ontological relationship to being, and they see where and how that is evacuated from the civilization. Every single ridiculously named religious tradition, and the nonsense that’s being spouted from all of them, has no relationship to prophecy — and yet all of them claim their origins in prophecy. It’s very simple.

58:58 Percy Shelley: perfect example of the prophet. William Blake: perfect example of the prophet. Shelley’s even better, because he’s not allied to any religious, political, or ideological force. He’s telling you the gap between the lived experience of a broken, ontologically broken civilization — foundationally broken, at the level of ontology — he’s telling you the distance between that civilization’s relationship to existence and the reality of what is possible, what is real,

59:25 beyond the extremely limited, constricted, death-anxious perception and conception of the human organism at any given moment in time. They’re trying to show you, they’re trying to say: there is more, there’s better, there’s more possible. But instead these civilizations —

59:46 decline and collide into corruption and malice and bureaucratic dissent and hatred and control of resources and desperate scarcity — because of what? They have no relationship to the sacred. And so they can’t actually form relationships to themselves or other people. It’s a spiritually evacuated paradigm. Understand this: spiritually evacuated in terms of the individual, spiritually evacuated in terms of the possibility of relationship, spiritually evacuated in terms of the culture.

1:00:16 All it is, is the death-anxious nonsense of a mineral water salesman telling you that you need to do this, or be this, or buy this, in order to come into relationship with personal satisfaction, or whatever it is — which is nothing more than the palest substitute for the ontological ground of the sacred itself. Real cosmological relationship to being, which is intimate relationship to the cosmos.

1:00:44 And that is available to human beings. It is everything that human beings want, beneath all of the different disguises of the petty desires which organize humanity and the world civilization today.

1:00:56 It’s what’s beneath all instrumentalization, beneath all capitalism, beneath all colonialism. And the reality is, you need to look at the history of the horror to understand how it was created, how it exists now, and how we turn away from it. And it’s the return of shamanic consciousness. It’s the return of medicine consciousness. It’s the return of a deeper, more profound relationship to being itself. Thank you. That’s what I got.

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2. The Two Channels: Baseball Radio, Somatic Time, and the Technological Rift (Lecture 9/10/26)

00:00 So what I’d like to talk about is a bit of a personal pastime, but I think something with political, cultural, and philosophical implications: baseball radio

00:19 and baseball television. What I find interesting about technology is the production of the event. And this has been discussed in terms of philosophy of poetry, as well as philosophy of writing: that the act itself of inscription or transcription is the production of a second event.

00:45 So the first event occurs in experience, or occurs in immediate technological perception of the being. And this is what I mean by consciousness encountering existence, or encountering experience, through the biology of the organism. So there’s the initial encounter, which is to say the human being experiencing the phenomenon of,

01:15 let’s say, the sporting event, which is a manufactured phenomenon, a cultural phenomenon in space and in time. This is the same thing that can be said of the act of poetry, which is a witnessing presence encountering being. This would be Hölderlin’s vision of light gleaming through the trees, or Shelley’s encounter with Mont Blanc. These are encounters of being, the experience of being encountering itself.

01:45 [pause]

01:47 The technology of poetry is the inscription of the consciousness of Shelley or Hölderlin encountering being.

01:57 And so when we have the expansion of human technological modes of inscription — that’s everything from carving into stone, which we see in the ancient Olmec, or you could say Egyptian artifacts or Greek artifacts, carving into stone and carving metal, et cetera. That’s the kind of long-standing, long-existing historical

02:23 consciousness carved into stone, as stone persists longer than paper or an airwave. But we see in more recent times the acceleration of the technology of everything from the Gutenberg Bible or the printing press into increasingly digital technologies, which is to say technologies of non-local experience. And I went into this very deeply with my work on the neuroscience

02:53 of assembling modern civilization. This is particularly important in regards to what I’m now going to describe in terms of the baseball technology, which is the radio or the television — these technological institutions of the 20th century

03:16 having to do with electricity and the use of radio waves, microwaves, et cetera.

03:26 I guess transmission poles or transmission lines, for lack of a better word — I’m not extremely well versed in the actual instantiation of these structures, whether it’s AT&T for national broadcasting of television, or it is radio waves and radio device technology. What I observe, through science and philosophy being my advantages, is the assembly

03:56 of second experiences. And this is what all of human culture is based off of: the second experience. The primacy of experience is always relegated to the body, or the being, which is experiencing as such. And the issue of communication or expression — verbalization, or externalization, I think is the best word — and then the artifactual

04:23 externalization of that experience becomes the primary problem of human existence, which I would describe as fundamentally just a philosophical and ontological problem of being an organism which has a private realm, or a private domain, of consciousness. And this has to do specifically with the technology of the human body, and the reality that the human body is receiving and processing information through the nervous system. And these are all

04:52 private domains, which is, you could say, the world of dreams, or the world of

05:00 conscious, communicative existence wherein the self is in relation to world. And these private selves are the sort of lockbox, or the prism, the prison, or the cage of human experience.

05:18 And we seek to cross the boundaries of that prism or cage or lockbox through language, whether that be poetic language, whether that be descriptive, I guess, public language, the language of philosophy, the language of images, symbols, signs, and sounds, right?

05:43 Terence McKenna talks about this in terms of the small mouth noise, which I think is a really great way to sum up the state of human relationship to the body in terms of attempting to externalize or make manifest the self into the world. This is the primary existential problem, where the human experience is bound in many ways by ability or inability to actually communicate the self.

06:12 This is extremely critical: the ability to communicate the self. And so these technologies that we develop, whether that’s the written word, the spoken word, the radio, or even a primary cultural event such as baseball — and then the layer on top of that manufactured cultural event, which is the technology used to broadcast that

06:41 regionally or nationally —

06:45 is the production of a substantial theater of consciousness. And this is kind of the place where my philosophy and ontology and science have come to reside, in terms of the primacy of human experience being fundamentally the question of existence, which supersedes all scientific, mathematical, linguistic, or cultural inquiry. And all of that inquiry, in any different discipline or domain, must serve that

07:15 primary ontological foundation of the question of the experience of being. And to this, these are creative ways in which beings — you could say, right, the human organism — over millions of years of development of the native biological genetic technology of experience, has attempted to slowly and gradually begin to externalize itself into the world, right? Any sort of philosophy or myth

07:45 or creative art or economy is the attempt to express the inner condition of the human being. And I think when we look at large at human civilization and human civilizations, what I think we can experience readily is a sensation of poverty.

08:05 And this poverty comes from the lack thereof of communicative depth in relation to the self. And this goes back again to the primary issue of self and world. And I will draw this baseball radio analogy slowly outwardly: that the technology of experience, whether that’s the primacy of the neurological experience of being in space and time, or the secondary development of a

08:34 cultural theater, or even the tertiary development of a digital technology which is broadcasting a cultural theater — whether that’s regionally, nationally, or globally, instantaneously or with a broadcast lag — all of these different functions at work are actual, they’re real distances

09:00 from the primacy of experience. And this is the problem that we have at large with the symbolic language and cultural theater: that the human being is, in all of these different productions, attempting to return to, or even establish, a primacy of experience — to enter into the depths of communication and communion with being itself, which

09:27 traditions the world over have described as the fundamental spiritual experience of being, or the mystical experience of being. And what is, I think, so beautiful to me about these baseball broadcasts, especially early radio, anywhere between the ‘20s and the early ‘40s, is that with a nascent technology — much in the way of early Greek philosophy, when I’m talking about the pre-Socratics —

09:56 you are witnessing in real time the emergence of the expression of consciousness through a vehicle which is experimenting with a new technological register. So when I look at the development of the forebrain in the human being, really what I’m looking at is the establishment of a new frontier in which the human being is actually growing into that function. And this is really an extremely new function in human history

10:25 and the history of the cosmos — really just a couple hundred thousands of years. And so when we look at ancient Greek philosophy, particularly with Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey, and this finding and founding of the inner voice or the self-consciousness, which is conceived of to be the voice of the gods — this is one of the foundations of the Greek ontology. One of the foundations therein of this Greek ontology is

10:55 the species itself, in a kind of local register in terms of the Greeks, is attempting to come to grips with the foundation and establishment of this new mode of perception, this new technological device. And true technological literacy, to me, therein is the realization of the absolute interconnection and kind of dual function of, you could say, a symbolic wiring —

11:23 anything from literature to the radio to the internet — and biological or genetic wiring, which is the nervous system, or the forebrain, or the opposable thumb. These technological developments are so completely interrelated that it’s impossible to separate them. Because what is occurring is that you’re witnessing kind of a bootstrapping of consciousness, for lack of a

11:49 better word: this unconscious experimentation which occurs in nature, attempting to find the grappling hook through which and with which to move through existence and move through being, to sustain and persist itself thermodynamically and metabolically, from the cellular level to the complex compound organism level, even in terms of stellar fusion. This is working with energetic dynamics in space and time locally,

12:17 globally, and cosmologically. And this bootstrapping of consciousness — that is what we’re witnessing in history. And I’m not here giving any privilege to human history. I’m seeing the dynamics that play in human history playing in the history of the cosmos. So,

12:39 watching the development of the forebrain in relation to the ancient Greeks, right, the parallel that I’m drawing here is this early radio technology being used to broadcast the baseball game. This is everything from the complex interplay of the relation of the static to the newly emerging attempt to establish ground of communication between the radio device which is receiving the radio waves and the radio device which is broadcasting them, right? This is one aspect of it,

13:10 as well as the attempt to institute a theater in which human language and the sound of the environment of the game itself is able to communicate the game itself across a bridge of space and time. So this is additive complexity being broadcast through a new technological device, which is expanding the possibilities of perception, which therein

13:32 is creating in real time — iterating and improvising — really a new dimension of experience: human experience sitting at home, listening to the radio, broadcasting a baseball game maybe 250 miles from the location. And so I’ve talked deeply about this expansive principle of space and time through technology. I don’t think there’s a need to reiterate it here; it’s well documented in my works. But this is what to me is so appealing.

14:00 I mean, obviously I’m a very big baseball historian and researcher. I deeply enjoy it. There’s that aspect of it. But engaging with these radio games, right, there’s the aspect of preservation across space and time, where these have now been digitally documented and archived and are accessible across a bridge of 80, 90 years. So you’re able to witness this

14:30 process and experience it. And understanding this is what would now be called, like, a very low-resolution form of technology in terms of modern human consciousness — but it is precisely this low-resolution form of human technology which makes available a domain of experience which,

14:58 I guess I would almost allude to it as authentic. And this is why I’ll bring back again this artifactual consciousness idea.

15:09 Because what these broadcasts are, are artifacts — as well as the human being itself, of course, being an artifact. When we look back at some of the earliest homo sapiens skeletons, or kind of archaeological records of the human being and human body, as well as the civilizations that the human being and the human body established, we’re looking at an archaeological or sedimentary record of

15:38 the development of human being, attempts.

15:43 Um, I guess what I would like to say here in terms of attempt is that these are iterative —

15:53 iterative processes which occur at the organism level as well as at the species level, in terms of culture or civilization or structures or infrastructure. These iterative attempts for consciousness to create sustainable, persistent scaffolding to allow itself to exist. So when we think about the human lifespan,

16:17 the expansion of the human lifespan, maybe in a prehistoric sense from a couple decades to three decades at most, to maybe in the modern age 70, 80, 90, right? This tripling of the human lifespan. We’re looking at the scaffolding of civilization through the interrogation of the human body, the human ecosystem, to create sustainable, prolonged possibilities for human life. And in doing so, prolonging

16:46 the possibility of human development, which is to say human capacity. And this is the name of the game in the broadest sense, in the cosmological sense of the universe. And this is precisely what the radio, or the television, or the internet, or artificial intelligence are doing and are attempting to do at the most unconscious or subconscious level of this drive to human innovation, which I think we experience

17:16 as something approximating an immortal or eternal, or something fundamental about the human condition. What I’m suggesting is this is baked into the cosmological being itself.

17:30 We’ve written a pretty substantial tract about the character of being, right? Drawing down the ontological first principles and the scientific first principles to actually describe what being is foundationally — not just at an organism level or the phenomenological level, but at the cosmological level. And we are having this experience which I would call technological evolution, or revolution, or paradigm evolution.

17:59 These are, I think, pretty common parlance, but the way that I’m using them, I think, is a little different. What I’m alluding to here is that we live — or the cosmos itself lives — in long time scales of technological epochs. And that epoch, again, is the forebrain, the opposable thumbs, different emergences of species through the coalescence of various different

18:29 cosmological and ecological factors, right? And we see this also in terms of Pangaea and the shifting geological realities, which emerge different tribal realities in different locations depending on water sources, right? There’s this whole trickle-down effect therein. And in these technological epochs we are witnessing in real time the relationship to the emerging consciousness which is made available

19:00 by the technology — again, whether that’s AI or the internet or the forebrain or the human species itself —

19:08 and the limitations: finding those limitations, and then seeking out creative ways to engage, prolong, or trespass against them, to jailbreak those limitations. That’s just a cosmological kind of Darwinian principle at work in reality and existence itself. We see this perpetually in the history of the cosmos itself, particularly if we were just gonna localize it to

19:37 the changing of circumstances on Earth as it relates to organisms, all the way down to cells. So this principle at work — when we look at paradigm shifts, we’re basically looking at pre-modernity cosmos and post-modernity cosmos, or present and post-modernity cosmos. And what I mean by that is the acceleration of technological revolution or evolution is so substantial.

20:07 And I’ve argued this already in my works on the lithium — the lithium ape, right, is what I’ve called it. That the technological acceleration of the human species harnessing energetic information, right — that’s fusion, that’s like the lithium battery, that’s oil, right, it’s the electricity, it’s all of the different energetic revolutions that mark the end of the 19th and into the 20th century.

20:36 You’re witnessing this profusion of diversity of technological possibilities. And this is why baseball for me is such a fantastic marker of, I would say, the most interesting and complex time in cosmological history insofar as we are aware. And I’m talking about Earth, since — we’re aware of so little, but the little that we are aware of, it’s very easy to see pre the founding of

21:05 America, so to speak — we could say the 1850s and prior — there’s this very, very slow movement. You have maybe fire, you have the printing press. Obviously, when we’re talking about technological revolution and evolution in a natural sense, these things occur incredibly slowly, and they’re driven by the selection of traits that occur at a genomic level. The paradigm shifts that occur evolutionarily are incredibly slow, and this is the primary contradiction

21:35 we experience as a human species in the modern age, which is to say technological proliferation and the paradigm-shifting availability of information and energy, which then again scaffolds and bootstraps cultural technology — which is to say, you could say digital technology is a good word for it. It’s not associated directly with the genome. We process it epigenetically.

22:03 It feeds into the genome and produces paradigm-shifting change, right? The genome in space is experiencing reality in such a way that it changes, right? The information changes the genetic structure of the organism. This is how evolution works. But the exponential kind of turning point, or the crossing of the Rubicon

22:29 of human and cosmological history, occurs when human beings become capable of harnessing not only the energy laid in the earth, which is the energy of dying and dead stars, which is to say oil, but then again the fusion process, in terms of Fermi in the early 20th century.

22:52 What we’re witnessing in real time is that there has been no real paradigm-shifting evolution that has occurred at the level of the genome of the human species, excepting the forebrain, which was hundreds of thousands of years prior — which I’ve already said is the birth of philosophy. It’s the birth of critical thought. It’s the birth of reflexivity. It’s the birth of self-consciousness, right? And all of those consequences are downstream in everything from Homer to Einstein to relativity to

23:21 Copernicus, right? All of these different things are the species itself becoming conscious through the ritualization of this new technological encoding into the species-level genome. And that revolution or evolution — everything is an avalanche downstream from that, to the point of which there is this processual, transpersonal, historical uncovering, which Hegel loves to speak about. This is kind of the local level of Hegel:

23:50 this uncovering of the energetic source and resource of the cosmos, both ontologically and physically, everything from oil to the monad in Leibniz’s terms. This discovery becomes the particle accelerator of modernity, at which it spirals entirely out of control. Because the break primarily occurs from — there’s been this evolutionary paradigm shift in the forebrain,

24:20 and this paradigm shift in the forebrain produces, over centuries, a transpersonal, species-level breakthrough in understanding how to harness energy. But the species itself has not changed since the discovery of the forebrain. And furthermore, just uncovering how to harness this energy has nothing to say about the right way to use it. And this obviously is every ethical, political, economic, cultural debate that ever occurs

24:48 on the stage of human history. It’s all the same thing over and over again: how do we use what we have, the energy we have, in a way that’s either sustainable or entirely self-serving, et cetera, et cetera. It’s ceaseless. Because it’s all being discussed at a level which really is barely worth discussing, because the ontological ground is not being sufficiently engaged. And it’s funny, this all comes from baseball radio.

25:18 Because there’s this split, and I’ve discussed this in terms of channel one and channel two technology. Channel one being genomic technology, natural kind of Darwinian evolutionary technology: the forebrain and the opposable thumb. And channel two technology, which is civilizational or cultural. It’s scaffolding, right? It’s architecture that we engage with on a daily basis, whether that’s the television or the radio or the internet or artificial intelligence. And

25:47 historically — I mean, I would say for the entire history of the cosmos, insofar as we are aware — those two channels have been virtually indistinguishable. And what we’ve witnessed throughout the course of the 20th century into the 21st is the hyper-acceleration, the exponential acceleration, of harnessing energy latent in the cosmos to create and craft infrastructure in this capacity, rapidly outpacing the evolutionary,

26:15 which is the paradigm-shifting technology at the level of the species, of the organism itself. And that’s what I mean when I’m talking about the technology of writing, or the technology of inscription into stone, even the technology of cosmology in terms of ancient civilizations. This breakthrough, undoubtedly at a material level, is a breakthrough, right? But what are the consequences of the breakthrough? And these are the ethical debates about everything from AI to the telephone.

26:45 The consequence of the breakthrough at the ontological level is that the species itself is on a different time. It’s on a deeper, more ancestral time in relationship to the technological revolutions, which now are epochs of five minutes, as opposed to the evolutions of the human species, which are epochs of hundreds of thousands of years.

27:13 And understanding this, similar to the way that Percy Shelley understood it in a revolutionary sense, in terms of civilizational revolution or transvaluation of values

27:24 towards a real kind of communal ethical system in light of the emerging modernity — this is the crux of that. Because obviously these technologies are emerging, but they’re being used in the most primal, unconscious ways. And this is essentially entirely having to do with the failure of the human species — you could call it a failure or not, I would just call it reality — to move at the speed of what is becoming

27:53 light, right? These cultural, architectural technologies are now evolving at light speed. And there is no —

28:05 There is no real resolution to that. I mean, unless you were going to attempt to, like, alter the human genome. And I mean, that’s still using a channel two technology to try to mess with channel one, which I would argue is deeply unnatural.

28:23 It’s just an ethical debate. That’s not what we’re here doing. And this is why the baseball radio stuff is so interesting to me, because it emerges at a period of time where humanity is becoming somewhat more skilled at using these digital, electrical technologies, setting up wire systems that communicate across regions and ultimately across the United States with the AT&T national broadcast network, I believe in the early 1950s.

28:52 The first World Series is broadcast nationally a couple of months after. I mean, you have these beautiful artifacts of this emerging digital technology with all of the imperfections, all of the static, all of the — I would say, in a Benjaminian sense, this is why I bring it back to the artifact — all of the aura of humanity coming into contact with a new function, a new possible phenomenology, and thus producing really a new intermediary reality,

29:22 which has a different contact of experience. You listen to these old radio games, it’s profoundly different than being at the games, because what’s being produced is really a cultural art form through this emergence of the new technology. And the art form bends the boundaries between the real and the artificial, right? We could say baseball is a manufactured game occurring on the plane of the real. It’s using real energy, it’s using real space, the same way that maybe a Chekhov play in a theater would do.

29:52 But at the same time, there is a proliferation of that original cultural event, this original theater, into a new space, which creates an artifact of experience which is simultaneously nowhere and everywhere. And that’s the anticipation of the digital.

30:13 You can also see this in terms of baseball cards and the printing method of the multi-dot CMYK lithography, which anticipates pixelization. And I’ve gone into that in depth in terms of early tobacco cards from the early 1900s. These are the emergences of technologies, which are the encounter with new possibilities that develop process-based ontologies within those disciplines that allow us to

30:39 deal with and manufacture and create alternate realities and alternate spaces. And this, of course, returns us to the problem of the primacy — the experience of the primacy — of being, right? This question of: how do we communicate existential reality, or the existential condition of being human? And this is obviously where we invent language, we invent literature, we invent

31:07 painting or music, right? These are different methods of communicating a deeper existential condition, which is primarily the concern and realm of, I would say, ontology. And this is why Heidegger engages so deeply in poetry, because he understands and intuits this connection: that the experience of being, in an abstract or symbolic sense — it’s not possible to understand in an abstract or symbolic sense. But

31:34 the symbolic sense is rather a gateway into understanding the character of being. And this is why science and math, mathematics, gets so caught up. They mistake the symbol or the abstraction or the concept for the reality. And the reality is always experiential. It’s always immediate. It’s always a primacy. These are just different ways to enter into relationship with that. And the greatest scientists, including everyone from Bohr to Einstein, understand this.

32:03 It really is an ontological question, in the same way that Newton understood physics as an ontological question. So proceeding from there, the question is: with these technologies as they continue to scaffold, and these alternate realities continue to be generated, are we getting closer to and further away from the experience of being? And this is why I grabbed baseball radio at the outset of the 20th century, because

32:31 there is a period, I think, in the rise and fall of all technological epochs, as there are with empires — a period of self-discovery which produces the most fertile works. And what I mean by this is, the self-discovery is this new technological branch which is really a frontier of the possibility of realization. And it produces the venture, it produces the quest, or the question inherent in this new emerging possibility.

33:00 Once the technology, so to speak, is mastered, I would say it’s a cyclical process where there must then be a new technology with a further reach. And this is humanity’s fascination with technology in general: the prosthetic of the forebrain, just as much as the prosthetic of artificial intelligence or the internet or the radio. These advances, even artificially

33:27 or even symbolically, as in the realm of literature, writing, philosophy, or

33:34 the internet or the radio — what they do is they produce new ventures, new possibilities, new terrain in which to excurse or incurse. And what I mean by that is, for consciousness to venture into these domains and attempt to experiment with them to produce new possible realizations of the self. And this is what nature is doing in a Darwinian sense. And I would argue this is what the grand evolutionary experience of the cosmos is doing as well, characterologically.

34:03 And this goes back to Heraclitus’ great elucidation: the Aeon is a child at play with colored balls. It’s a phenomenon of experimentation and play in a universal sense. And this is why we crave technological advance. But again, the issue is — and I return to this because it’s so critical, and it explains the ecological crisis that we are currently in — is that

34:27 this new advance is occurring, really for the most part, in such a constrained period of time, we could say over barely 100 years, entirely in the domain of channel two technologies, channel two infrastructures, and channel two prosthetics. The channel one prosthetic of the human genome, or the evolutionary status of the human genome, has substantially not changed, right? These changes take large time scales, glacial time scales, to come into effect. And so when we are having

34:57 this experience of profound technological transformation, this is just hitting an object which is effectively standing still in time, and overwhelming that object, right? It’s a sea or a flood which cannot be adequately metabolized. And I’ve discussed this in terms of neurological bandwidth, right? This is actual capacity to metabolize experience in terms of sensory load, energetic load, nervous system bandwidth.

35:28 And this is the problem, right? So when I go back and listen to these old baseball radio broadcasts, you’re witnessing the emergence of this technological epoch of exponential transformation. And really what it is, is it exists on a different time. It exists more so on a somatic time: the crowd noise, the space, even the refusal of baseball’s rules — which now obviously work with a pitch clock, a pitch timer — to

35:55 function on anything other than somatic time, right? The pitcher takes as long as the pitcher needs to take to deliver the ball. The game takes as long as the game needs to take to complete nine innings, 27 outs. So the loss of that somatic time is necessarily the consequence of the hyper-acceleration of these technological modes, right? When you move from regional radio to national television, to global internet, to space-time condensation of AI

36:24 into an immediate Alexandrian library of all of human history, generating immediate categorical archival recombinations of human language into result patterns based on just human language, right, as a literal communication bot or a chatbot — you’re looking at the increasing loss of somatic time.

36:49 And somatic time is the bridge between channel one and channel two architectures, because somatic time is a nervous system architectural reality built into and baked into the human genome. This is the human species. It is a time of neurological experience at the limit of the organism body. And this encounter is what is producing the increasingly fraught conditions of modernity, which have spiraled into a profoundly asomatic, or asymptotic, time, so to speak.

37:19 And what I mean by that is the human register has been entirely overwhelmed by the technological superstructure, which is the idea or the foundation of progress. And this is the addiction to progress, or the madness of progress: that even as we continue to innovate these technological terrains, and thus call ourselves masters of reality, or the most innovative civilization, or the most innovative epoch, the consequences are the spiraling out of control of the human relationship to these technologies, right?

37:49 We naturally assume that as we expand the terrain of the possibility of experience, we become more productive. This is fundamentally untrue. It’s the delusion of a conqueror mindset, so to speak, right? Because there are foundational ecological and architectural realities, not only of the human experience but of the global, right — at the Earth level or the cosmological level experience. And we don’t — I believe Carl Sagan says this — we don’t sufficiently understand

38:18 the scientific ground upon which we stand. And this is really the source of all human delusion. So, looking back at these baseball radio games and listening to them, I experience — right, and this is the great thing about the artifact, and this is why I’m so insistent upon the artifact and the archive, and it occupies so much of my time and my thought and my space — is that

38:44 the archive and the artifact represent a moment in time of the human or the cosmological relationship to this, the infrastructure of consciousness as it is being mediated by energetic transformation, which is the transformation of energy, the transformation of organisms, et cetera. And we’re witnessing this in real time: this glacial movement, or formerly glacial movement, of organisms interacting with the field of being, which is the domain of the real, or the world. And

39:14 in that interaction changing over time through genetic movement, right, which is reproduction — or we could talk about this at a cellular level in terms of energetic transformation, even a stellar level in terms of the organization of the cosmos or the galaxies in terms of the presence of active stars and dying stars. This is the arrangement, right? It’s like a game of — what is that called? It’s a —

39:44 musical chairs, or an orchestration of energetic processes occurring in space and time. And through and by way of their movement, which we conceive of as history, whether that’s anthropological or cosmological, new circumstances emerge, and from those new circumstances new arrangements emerge, right? It’s this recursive process that we are observing. And the beautiful thing about

40:11 the radio is you’re really looking at the beginning of the technological age, the paradigm in which this exponential transformation is in the midst of occurring — 1920s — and then it just hyper-accelerates into the ‘30s and ‘40s with the nuclear bomb, fusion, the television, right? And at this point it has entirely spiraled into this self-consuming, exponential system of energetic overwhelm, right? And I’ve already argued this is where

40:40 fascism gains a foothold, because really the age that we live in is a fascistic age of energetic transformation at all costs, without really concern for the consequence, whether that’s ecological or at the level of the infrastructure of the organism. And this is what leads to our ecological and human disaster, or human crisis, catastrophe. So you’re looking at this emergence of this artifact at the beginning.

41:13 You’re looking at the emergence of this artifact at the beginning of the split, right? The very beginning, right, when the river of time, or the river of history, so to speak, is forking. And it’s forking at an increasingly exponential pace. You can kind of imagine this as a graph or a curve, in which formerly channel one and channel two architectures were for the most part aligned due simply to energetic constraints and limitations. And then you have the harnessing of oil.

41:43 You have electricity, you have the light bulb, you have the factory, right? All of these different ways in which energetic processes begin to exponentially expand into space and generate new realities: radio, television, internet. At this fork you have this moment of strangeness and beauty, in which I would argue that the technologies themselves are still very much so part of the somatic space-time of the human architecture

42:13 and have not yet experienced the radical alien break, which I would say fundamentally is disturbing. And it’s disturbing because it is not compatible with the channel one architecture. So you’re interacting with all of these highly advanced, at-speed technological systems, which produce the feeling of strangeness, a persistent strangeness, which is hard to identify, but at the level of this kind of seething

42:41 permanence beneath your temporary or phenomenological encounters with them. And the reason for that is because they are profoundly incompatible with the nervous system architectures of the human experience itself, right? Because they’re not operating on the same time-space wavelength as the grounded flesh-and-bone neurological, architectural body of the human experience itself. So this divorce

43:09 from the human experience, really — we see this process occur in everything from fire to the Gutenberg Bible again, right — into this increasing divergence through the harnessing of more and more and more latent energetic capacity at the universal or cosmological level, whether that’s through oil or through nuclear fusion. And we end up in the world that we live in now, which I would argue is entirely absurd, entirely

43:39 sublime, and strange. And the reason for that is because the operating principles under which humanity is operating are entirely inhuman. They don’t serve any aspect of the real somatic, architectural, nervous-system-level realities of the human experience, which is again a glacial transformation. It’s an architectural fixture in space and time which is moving slowly in terms of how it changes. Again, the forebrain, or the opposable thumb.

44:09 These changes, they don’t manifest because of exponential technological revolutions. Those revolutions can influence how genomic structures change over time, but they change glacially over time. We’re talking about time scales of thousands and thousands of years, not 2018 to 2026. These are radically different time scales.

44:36 Because of this technological revolution and evolution at the level of channel two — civilization, culture, world energy — we believe that these are real advancements. But in reality, what they’re creating and what they’re causing is profound disturbance at the level of the human experience. And this is why I come back to the primacy of the experience of being itself, because when we understand this at a ground level ontologically, we look at everything around us from that perspective.

45:05 The only problem we have, and the only problem we can solve, is an ontological problem of being itself, and the experience of being itself, embodied. Not abstractly, not symbolically, not mathematically, not even scientifically, not even literarily, right? Dostoevsky or Gödel, right? These may serve us roughly, but the reality is we are experiencing being itself right now.

45:33 That is the immediacy of the ontological problem and the ontological question. And the experience of being as it is impacted by these exponential technologies, right, it calls into question this, we could say, enterprising grid of human character, which I think in large part, especially in the West, is conceived of as the source of innovation or power or meaning.

45:58 But in reality, when we look at the real somatic consequences of this kind of behavior, especially when left unchecked, entirely unchecked, we experience profound dislocation from human experience, and I would argue misery, destruction, and calamity. But we look at these technologies as a sort of salvation, or that they may save us by further revolution.

46:25 But we’re just missing — we’re missing the entire ground of what’s actually happening. And this all just comes right back to listening to those baseball radio games. It’s the moment that that fork in the road becomes perceptible,

46:39 but there’s still this warmth, right? There’s like the crackling of the fire and the static of the radio, and the slow tones of the announcer, and the occasional advertisements for Gillette razors, right? You’re living in a different world of perception. Even down to the sole sponsor of the World Series broadcast, Gillette Blue Blades, right? You hear it over and over again, and you just keep hearing the tone or the chime of the bell.

47:10 You’re not yet living in the SensoDyne LLC world of venture capital, where these non-existent corporations crop up into being and get multi-billion-dollar buy-ins by shadow stockholders every five seconds. You’re living in this very somatically slow-moving world, which is just emerging into this digital sphere of what will become this avalanche of transformation,

47:39 which is really rifting space-time fundamentally, right? Rifting the human experience of space-time, and actually ontologically rifting space-time by way of the creation of these alternate realities, which are harnessing real energetic latencies in the cosmos, right? Oil or fusion, to change time, change the experience of time. The ground of time is the place from which we experience it. Einstein understood this well. But

48:08 when we make that change there are real consequences, because we are dealing with an architectural body, a nervous system body. It’s not an abstract, free-floating consciousness — although some people may experience it as such, until something happens to the body, right? And then all of a sudden you realize: my consciousness is actually an architecture in space and time, and it is a product of and an unfolding of a larger time-scale genomic process, a glacial process of evolution,

48:37 in a cosmological sense as well as in a Darwinian sense. So that’s what I have. I appreciate your time. I’ll talk to you later.

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3. The Ages of Technological Consciousness — 9/12/16 Lecture

00:01 So I think the idea here will be the ages of technological consciousness. And it’s a complex, multi-layered idea, so I actually want to ground it in baseball photography. I might try to find a photo of that a bit later to do it.

00:21 These technological epochs are multi-layered. I think most people will discuss them maybe extending as far back as fire, in terms of specifically human inventions, but I want to call them cosmological inventions. And I think you’ll understand this quite well based on my last two lectures — and this is kind of a necessary third to them — where,

00:45 if we understand revolutions and evolutions of cosmic energy, stellar energy, thermonuclear energy in a galactic or universal sense, as it transforms over space and over time through gradients. And what I mean by a gradient is like a form, or a vessel, or a flue, so to speak. And this is what Darwin understood — I mean, Darwin’s evolution is such a critical piece of my ontological perception.

01:14 This is what Darwin understood at a species level, but this is extendable through cosmological energetic transformation: that we as human beings are a localized experience of this transformation, and we transform through it by cosmologically native technology, right? This is what’s so fascinating about DNA. And reproduction itself — it’s also interesting how reproduction is so

01:43 sensorily incentivized, so to speak. That this is a cosmological technology which we take for granted because we’re so embedded in the human experience, right? It’s a —

01:56 It’s being the hardware itself. You perform the functions that are inbuilt to the hardware, right — neurologically, synaptically, right, genetically. The literal information that we incarnate as individuals, we’re performing that function in real time. And we perceive that to be our world, which in some ways it is, locally.

02:19 But globally, cosmologically, right? We are having this experience of a baked-in cosmological technology which has changed over time, right? Darwin’s evolutionary conditions, which form new apparatuses within the existing superstructure of the human being, right? So I talked about the opposable thumbs or the forebrain, right? These are prostheses,

02:49 as you can imagine it, right? You grow an arm on the already existing superstructure of the human being, which performs an additive evolutionary function. These things were not born and did not survive without the additive evolutionary function. Pseudo-paradigm transformations occur all the time at a species level.

03:14 There may be a mutation that briefly exists in the species lineage, and that mutation disappears, because that mutation has proven itself not to be evolutionarily functional — which is to say, to increase survivability or persistence, to bring it back to my ontology, right? So

03:33 this is the overarching technology. And this is why people who are religious or theological, in effectively all ways, will call this creation, or the God of creation, right? That there is actually an intelligence at work in the cosmos. And you don’t need to be a religious zealot or a hard materialist to understand it — you could understand it from either perspective: that the intelligence at work in the cosmos is a development of persistence technology,

04:02 because being itself is persistence. Being itself is that which continues to be. So how does being continue to be? This is the question which unfolds the entire evolutionary, long-time teleology of all species, all events that occur in a cosmological sense. It becomes a predictable theater, which is funny to say in today’s modern world. So in this

04:30 persistence ontological programming — the cyclical, with the occasional burst forward of the forebrain or the thumb or the human being through the attempt, right, of being’s creative attempt to find pathway through space and time to persist as a form, or a shard, within the dynamic energetic field of stellar and thermonuclear energy, right? This is a constant and persistent experimentation.

04:59 Right? This is why Heraclitus’s ontological axiom — the Aeon is a child at play with colored balls — continues to remain such a fantastic summation of the actual process that is at work in being’s experimentation with formulating long-term persistent structures. So, when —

05:22 We are within that, naturally. The human being itself is a long-term — millions of years, and billions if you include the stellar developments and the cellular developments that preceded, the chemical developments —

05:36 long-term architectural change over time,

05:42 in light of what in reality are changing circumstances, right? And this is where human technologies become a very interesting interlocution, and why I bring in the baseball photograph. Because what we’re talking about is the introduction of simulation. This is a concept, if you want to research it — the philosopher Baudrillard, I would say, is primarily the philosopher of simulation.

06:11 Or Debord as well. These French philosophers who — I think the Paris Commune really contributed to this, and actually Arthur Rimbaud’s attempt at becoming a fighter, a revolutionary fighter, in the Paris Commune. The Paris Commune is a fantastic historical example of the break in theatrical public time.

06:34 The idea that history itself is a public theater, that it is a manufactured technology to create, within the circumstances of human perception, persistent structures which benefit some and do not benefit others. This is the game of human culture and human civilization, and it’s thousands of years old, and it’s pretty contrived. It’s the same thing over and over again.

06:58 What I’m trying to say here, in short, and why the baseball photograph is a much more interesting example of this manifestation of technology, and why hard science is behind technological revolution: and the technological revolution itself, in a human context, creates what I discussed in the previous lectures as channel one, which is glacial genomic evolution. Universal technology, so to speak, at work. It is a long time scale,

07:28 a process of the literal shifting of a species’ genome to adapt to conditions against survivability — genetic adaptation, right? That’s channel one. Channel two is the creation of civilization. It’s the creation of the cultural, which is to say

07:51 non-organic, I think, is a good way of putting it. That’s not a hard line, but it is a good way of just creating the delineation to understand this. A non-organic form of technology, which is to say maybe a robot dog, or artificial intelligence, or the invention of the photograph.

08:10 What these creations do is they create a not-parallel but actual intersecting line with the genomic process, which is the at-large universal stellar evolution of thermodynamic energy. Because of how it intercourses with the genome at a regional time level, which is epigenetic,

08:38 these technologies themselves change the way that energy exists and communicates and works in space and time. And this is why, if you think about some of the earliest technologies, such as fire or the cave painting — right, these are very intimately connected, in the long time scale, with the advent of the forebrain

09:04 at a natural level. These technologies themselves actually —

09:15 [interruption — background noise, speaker re-centers]

09:33 — allow for a shift in the natural local circumstances. You could conceive of it as — Paradise Lost is a great example of this concept. This natural local field, which is wholly a universal logic, which is not yet being redoubled by man’s consciousness. It’s not being reflected upon by man’s consciousness, right? So when Eve and Adam ingest the forbidden fruit of knowledge, they suddenly become aware of their conditions and circumstances. And this is a form —

10:03 it’s a forebrain myth. It’s a forebrain theology, theological storytelling, right? That becoming aware of their conditions is then what ejects them from paradise. Being totally unconscious within it, they exist within this perfect universal continuum of channel one architecture. If you can understand that, right? The genome is a natural technology of long-time-scale evolution in direct relationship to the field of its creation.

10:33 But when that genome itself acquires the necessary prosthetic infrastructure to become conscious of that sort of universal source, so to speak — that channel one architecture which forms it — then you have this split. You have what I described in the previous lectures as the fork in the road, or the fork in the river. And what that is, is the splitting off which ultimately becomes another

11:00 genetic channel, right? Another channel of genetic information. If you think of that splitting off, that fork-in-the-road structure, as something that splits, diverts, and then interweaves with the genome at the regional timescale level of generational existence, through epigenetics. Because these are the circumstances in which the genome has to solve the problem of survival and survivability.

11:30 When these circumstances accelerate — 1800s, especially into the 1900s and into the 2000s — this is an exponential acceleration due to the harnessing of local energetic sources, external energetic sources: everything from the factory meats of Upton Sinclair to Ford’s cars

11:58 to the atom bomb, nuclear fusion, to harnessing lithium for a cell phone from a mine.

12:10 When these energetic conditions, right, when they’re thoroughly grasped and understood — which is the hard science revolution of the late 1800s and early 1900s, the hard science breakthroughs, which then become the technological informational breakthroughs of the 20th and 21st century: Claude Shannon, great example, computational logic; von Neumann — these new

12:40 capacities,

12:44 which are not channel one capacities. These are channel two capacities, inborn from the long-time-scale evolution of human consciousness, made possible by the channel one capacity of the advent of the forebrain, which was brought about by this universal intelligence of persistence,

13:06 by way of and through the necessary interweaving of the experiment of the organism in time over massive time scales. This is almost like a blind rat in a maze, so to speak. And this is what you would call, in psychology, the unconscious. It is the organism moving through space and time, development of internal technologies — the nervous system, or the forebrain,

13:36 the opposable thumbs — to deal with that which it bumps up against, which is the encounter with the world.

13:45 And this is why, when I say epigenetic transformation at the level of channel two architecture, this is everything from the great existentialist novel to the internet, to artificial intelligence, and all the downstream effects that those things have politically, economically, socially, culturally. That stream, that split stream,

14:09 of the channel two architecture of all of those technological revolutions at the level of human being systems. And the channel one architecture of the long, long, long-term forebrain: the acceleration of the changing circumstances, right, the changing world. Paradise Lost is technology, to put it simply.

14:32 The time of paradise is pre-technological — which I would say just does not exist, because the universe itself is a technological development of thermonuclear energy, even at the level of the creation of the universe itself. So this is pre-creation in a theological sense.

14:51 As these conditions accelerate, you have this forced adaptation at hyper-accelerating scales, and furthermore forced adaptations to increasingly unnatural circumstances. And so now I’ll throw a little Terence McKenna in, where he discusses novelty, and this idea that the universe itself is an accelerating, or an accelerator, of novelty and complexity.

15:16 I’m not necessarily going to agree or disagree with that at a cosmological level. I think the question itself is incredibly complex to reduce to that simple of a description.

15:44 But I will agree with it in the sense that that is what is happening in human history. And so what I did at the beginning of this lecture was explain how channel one architectures form in space and time. And that itself is actually incredibly simple, because it’s following long, long time-space coordinate rules of energetic movement. And those are very easily traceable,

16:15 as we just discussed in regards to the formation of the human being,

16:22 the organization of the solar system. These are kind of the laws of physics, so to speak. I would almost call Darwin a law of physics, because the laws of physics are ultimately laws of persistence.

16:38 I don’t want to get too into that in an astrophysical sense. It’s just going to get too complicated.

16:48 Tracing from the formation of the universe to the advent of the forebrain is almost a programmatic logic. And again, this is why I brought up the term “the unconscious,” and the universal intelligence of persistence being like a rat in a maze — a dark, dark, dark maze. Because the self, as it is being formed in this pre-adolescent

17:11 energetic structure which is attempting to persist through time, is bumping up, like a synapse in a sea of dark fluid, against all of these different obstacles, and is having to iterate itself to survive. And this is, I think, part of the horror of this pre-forebrain history of cosmological evolution: precisely that the unconscious is not

17:39 in awareness of the circumstances of being itself at a cosmological level. It is not adequately informed so as to survive well. It is surviving with the Joy Division line, Ian Curtis: “I survive on the best terms I can. The past is now part of my future. The present is well out of hand.” That’s a great line.

18:01 It’s a great line because it’s describing the condition of being a hopelessly unconscious organism in a web, a superstructural web of formations and formulations which are not really understood at all at the level of the organism. And this is why I brought in existential literature — not to overcomplicate, but this is why existential literature is so important: because existential literature is the documentation of the process of the organism becoming self-aware.

18:29 Existentialism is really the forebrain technology, the realization of the self: that the self exists in space and time, and what then to do with the freedom of the self, as Sartre says. And a lot of that just ends up being self-destruction, because the freedom is too much to bear — that’s his claim.

18:51 This technological revolution of the forebrain is really where things, to me, get interesting. Because, as I said before, this is the birth of philosophy. This is the birth of self-reflection. This is the birth of hearing the voices of the gods in Homer, which are the voices of the mind becoming conscious. You actually hear yourself think,

19:17 which is why I’m saying, again, this is the birth of philosophy. If you understand Homer in relationship to pre-Socratic philosophy, they’re the same thing. They’re saying and doing the same thing. They are a response to new technological possibilities within the inbuilt domain of the hardware of man at a species level. This new paradigm shift, which has held.

19:40 Right? That the forebrain has held, like the opposable thumbs, as technological incursions upon reality which create possibility of increased survivability, persistence. And this has been a massive transformation, right? And we can barely know all of the different circumstances which led to the technological development of the forebrain through glacial time at the level of the universal mind. We can barely know these things,

20:12 which is part of what’s so powerful about them. They emerge from a historical darkness, which makes human history look like a blip on the map — which effectively it is. The earliest things we know: Sumer and Babylon and Egypt, Greece, ancient China, ancient India. So from there, that’s where things get interesting. And this is why the baseball photograph for me is bang on.

20:41 I look at it as an industrial age crux, because it’s an image, and I’ll explain that in a second. And this is also because I love baseball. I love putting baseball things in here because it’s just very cool, I think. So as these technologies accelerate, they accelerate for one reason: because the channel one architecture, the forebrain, has cracked ground through scientific and philosophical revolution,

21:10 century after century after century. This is a process of handing off the baton.

21:17 Everything from Plato to Spinoza to Einstein. One of my favorite quotes of Einstein is, “I stand on the shoulders of giants.”

21:28 He says he stands on the shoulders of Maxwell primarily. Understand this as the hidden lineage of human transformation at a local level: cultural, civilizational, channel two architecture. Also partly channel one, because these people do participate in reproduction. Not always, but they do. So these

21:50 revolutions of consciousness — Copernicus, Galileo, this is all included. This is the process of creating — not even creating, but realizing — the actual vision of the cosmos, right? Ontologically, which would be Heraclitus.

22:07 Materially, which would be Einstein, Newton, Copernicus: creating a real picture of what existence is, what being is, what being does, and the real predictable consequences of movement in space and time of being at different levels of the superstructural formation — chemically, biologically, right? These are predictable laws,

22:33 which are then put into action to create technological processes and systems such as the personal computer, which I’m speaking on right now. These predictable outcomes, which are energetic transformations at the level of material, are what allow for the scaffolding of civilization.

22:51 And then these new technologies become baked into the human being’s perception and experience of existence. Whereas previously it may have been fire, it may have been the log cabin, this gets transformed into the glass skyscraper in Dubai, and the particle accelerator, right? Fertilizer.

23:15 These all have cultural, social, political, and even existential consequences on the being and the organism which is experiencing them in space and time. Those consequences — all of the ones I just listed, political, social, cultural — they’re all downstream of genetic consequences. They’re all downstream of epigenetic consequences. Why is this? Two parts. It changes the way that human beings reproduce, number one,

23:39 because persistence is now differently operative than it was in this kind of pseudo-Edenic world, right, which is the world before man touched the forebrain, and then before the forebrain touched the real physical principles and processes at work in the universe, which is the history of science and philosophy.

24:00 There’s that. And then there’s also the reality of experience, which is the genetic passing forward, the transfusion of the information of a lifetime — several lifetimes, hundreds, thousands, right? If we want to trace back genetic lineage, real ancestry, we’re tracing every human being back to the birth of the star, through different species, mutations, transformations, and paradigm shifts. Good luck.

24:30 You can understand that generally, but to actually understand the history at hand — I mean, how? How are you gonna know? You’re not, because it’s too complex. But you can understand generally how that moves in space and time.

24:52 So we navigate this terrain at the moment of the quantum revolution. And I think Fermi is the most important here, because Fermi is the one who actually builds Chicago Pile. Fermi is the one who actually weaponizes, or mobilizes, fusion — which is to say makes it manifest in the world — and then all the consequences downstream from that.

25:17 He’s obviously not the single actor at hand, right? But there’s that event in space and time. And that’s why the baseball photo is important. The baseball photo, to me, is a perfect example of how this comes into being. Because I love baseball, and I love baseball history. I think it’s great. But there’s something about baseball photography for me, early baseball photography, because

25:42 it’s the beauty of the artisanal craft and process of rendering a silver gelatin photo, and really the unconscious industrial process that was happening at the level of mass media news journalism at the time, creating these artifacts and works of art which really have no one source and creator, because they were created mostly by news syndicates for the purposes of printing them in newspapers. They were not even considered to be art forms. I did a very substantial

26:11 amount of research and publication on the reality, in my opinion, that this was a major art historical revolution which went entirely unrecognized — even as Europe, I would say, superficially worked with the concepts that in reality, in America, were occurring literally, which is why they weren’t recognized as art: which is to say industrial production and reproduction of images, and how that changes perception. So,

26:40 when we’re looking at a baseball photo from this era, there’s literally silver crystals in these images. They’re absolutely beautiful. Many of them are very high contrast. They’re extremely craft-based, which means there’s this painstaking time to take these, right? You’re attempting to document action in the early 1900s with really slow shutter speeds, right? This is a period of time where camera shutter speeds functioned entirely differently.

27:10 They’re very, very rudimentary. So you have these expert-level photographers who are working for these news syndicates, and then these photos go and are published in the New York Times and the biggest newspapers of the era, to spread America’s pastime, America’s cultural fascination, which is and was baseball. And this is all occurring in an industrial sense. So again, not really seen, but

27:39 they’re taking these photos, they’re painstakingly developing them and rendering them, and then they’re going in and they’re editing them by hand to accentuate certain aspects of the photo for certain news features. It’s an incredibly complex and kind of hidden process of creative art and manifestation, through this new technology of image representation of the early 1900s and late 1800s. Really, this to me — I mean, it is the revolution after painting.

28:07 It makes the real perceptible, at least from one perspective.

28:12 So these photos themselves — and this goes back to one of my last two lectures — are the creation of a new event. So when I think about early 1900s baseball, there’s a certain picture that I have of it. I mean, I was not there, right? And this is the thing about artifact consciousness. Artifact consciousness can help recall history, much like the body. The body’s very similar: you were not there

28:39 for the entire history of the formation of the body in which you live, and yet you experience it by reflecting upon it in the existing iterative form of the technology it exhibits or represents. And so that’s what artifact consciousness is. And that’s what these old baseball photos are. The image of early baseball is the combination of these crackling radio broadcasts with advertisements for Gillette,

29:07 the sounds of these old-time announcers, coupled with these beautiful, kind of crisp and brilliant, almost sepia-tinged, silver-gelatin-flecked photos — action photos, some of which have a slight blur, others of which are adaptations that photographers are attempting to create with the reality that shutter speeds could not accurately capture

29:34 how quickly the players were moving. As well as the fact that these are all black and white, and they were all produced for the purposes of documentation of the game, not aesthetically, which is to say superficially. These were material circumstances which were documented for journalistic purposes. They’re not meant to be art.

29:57 And yet precisely because of this, they are. I’m not gonna go too into this because I’ve already done so much on it; if you want to know more and learn more, there’s plenty. That beauty in these photos is not even necessarily early baseball, although early baseball is very interesting. It is the beauty of the technological representation of early baseball, which is something that doesn’t really exist.

30:22 And this is where this gets very spiritual and kind of mystical. And we relate this immediately back to the human technology itself, the human being. The human being itself is a technological experience of the interlocution of self and world, in which the self does not exist. The self is a technological encoding of a phase change in a long-term cosmological process of energetic transformation in and through the genome.

30:52 So the human being itself is this technological product — is then furthermore, and not a product, a process — which is furthermore producing technological artifacts and processes which are furthering the real simulation of consciousness as it occurs inborn in any specific genetic formation or organismic formation at any stage of sentience.

31:15 And this is the hilarity and the absurdity and the kind of farcicality of being human, in many ways. Because what we’ve done is we’ve taken one

31:27 sort of not-superficial, simulatory experience of being — which is to say living in this vessel, and having to persist in space and time as this vessel, and then having to come up with creative solutions to continue to exist, which is the human condition, as is well documented in the existential literature. But then, in that process,

31:55 exponentializing these channel two architectures which I’ve discussed,

32:07 to create further and further, deeper and deeper simulations, or simulacra, of existence. That not only are we human beings having this simulated technological, deep technological experience of existence — we don’t even understand that. We’re just having it. Most people are not conscious of that. And then furthermore, we’re having that through a cell phone, or through a baseball game, or through a movie on a TV screen.

32:36 Understand these layers: cultural simulation, technological simulation on channel two architecture, which would be a computer or a cell phone. And then the simulation of the human experience, which is the deep time genetic transformation of stellar energy into this complex form, which is the organism, with the organs and the forebrain and the hindbrain and everything that comes with being in the midst of this evolutionary process.

33:05 And I think Jim Morrison describes this really well in terms of, like, the strangeness of the changing. And Morrison being, in my opinion, like a modern American shamanic figure, in the sense that he’s very aware of this and is working with culture and theater to be in relation to it, whereas the mass, the majority of modernity, is entirely unconscious to it and deaf to it.

33:36 And I think this is necessarily why he turns to poetry late in his life. Because you’re working with something that’s unconscious, and you’re using conscious iteration and movement of technology — he calls this “The Lords” — you’re using that in an entirely unconscious world. You’re kind of like poking a bear, so to speak, for lack of a better word.

34:00 It’s not very practical. And so the poets understood this quite well. This ontological investigation is something that is effectively transmitted in a long-term secret society. So Jim Morrison is to Hölderlin as Hölderlin is to Percy Shelley, as Percy Shelley is to

34:22 Adi Shankara, and so on and so forth. This is the concept in humanity of the mysteries, which is really nothing more or less than consciousness of the transformative principle in space and time at various different gradients of awareness of that being as such, which is ontology.

34:42 So I think that’s effectively it. There’s not much ground, I think, this lecture needed to cover, because the first two covered a substantial amount of what I’m at least on right now. And

35:02 there’s great power in the awareness of that. But when I’m speaking about this channel two hyper-acceleration, right — because we go from fire and the Gutenberg Bible and cave painting, even kind of religion, channel two, right, it’s storytelling to produce certain cultural outcomes. However slow that actually is: you have to recruit people, right? And locally you assemble them. It’s a very arduous process.

35:33 As this accelerates — and the baseball photograph is a live documentation of that — the shutter speeds rapidly accelerate as the camera innovates. We get color photography, and then 50 years later there’s a broadcast on national television of the World Series, albeit in black and white. Ten years later it’s a color broadcast. These transformations, which are transformations in coal and oil and nuclear energy,

36:01 all of these transformations accelerating at this cast-off point of industrial modernity. The weaving gets tighter and hotter. The intensity of the experience of being a long-term glacial channel one architecture in the midst of a world which will not stand still

36:25 increases. The existential experience, this heightened irreality, which is described quite well by Kafka at the turn of the century — the early turn of the century — and Lispector in mid-century, and Camus as well, reaches this point of almost intolerability. This is, again, I’ve described this before, this is what we experience in modernity. We experience just how extreme

36:53 channel two architectures continue to shift and entirely revolutionize the terrain in which we have the channel one experience. So again, this is self and world. And the human experience, and the experience of all life, has always been to reconcile self and world. This is why we have cosmology, ontology, philosophy, and science, all of these different forms: to attempt to reconcile the experience of self and world. Who am I? What am I? What is being?

37:21 What am I doing here? What am I to figure all of these things out? But when channel two architectures reach such a fever pitch of transformation, right, the energetic stability of the ecosystem itself is now increasingly called into question, obviously, right? Harnessing these resources at the rate we harness them, especially when they’re non-renewable in an Earth ecosystemic sense, has consequences — including releasing these energetic forms into the ecosystem, which

37:50 previously was existing via a channel one developmental arc, developmental path. You drastically, radically shorten that, continue to introduce and increase circumstances of energetic transmission and transformation.

38:09 It’s almost as if, when you reach the 21st century, every single day

38:16 there is an entire paradigm shift that occurs in the realm of channel two architecture, which has profound consequences on the existence and persistence of channel one architectures, as well as on the ecosystem where this entire game is being played out. So you could perceive of it as the two interweaving strands of the genome in a historical sense. This is kind of looking at it through a Hegelian lens, and the Hegelian lens to me becomes increasingly relevant once we have the introduction of human technology.

38:46 So you could take this all the way back to fire and cave painting. Fire and cave painting, as they intersect with channel one, which is genetic infrastructure, are at a very long wavelength. It’s much closer to the rhythm, the somatic rhythm, of channel one glacial evolution of the genome itself, the natural evolution. But you take that and you throw that a couple thousand years into the future

39:15 with, let’s say, the iPhone or artificial intelligence. These iterations of channel two architecture occur at such speed, and weaponize energy so quickly. The development of data centers, for instance, is a great example. The movement of energetic infrastructure in modernity occurs at such a seamless pace,

39:41 due to all of the different channel two architectures that have already been created — shipping, the internet — that the transformations that channel one is experiencing, again, that wavelength rapidly shortens and rapidly increases. This is like an amplitude visualization. And in that experience, intensity is heightened, duration is shortened, change becomes quicker.

40:11 And the channel one infrastructure, the channel one organism, has to process this. It has to cope — which in reality is nothing more than adapt. It has to exist within these circumstances.

40:29 And this is what, in modernity — there’s a thousand different ways to put it. You have Marx’s alienation, you have suffering, you have, right? Because this incompatibility forces such drastic adaptability that there becomes — and I think many people ask this question — is this worth it, right? These technological revolutions that we perceive to be an advancement of the human species. This is the whole bet of modernity: that technology is progress.

41:00 And this is a claim to a certain form of epistemological knowledge, that this is not knowledge of being, as in the terms of Shankara or Hölderlin. The advancement of knowledge in a being sense would be ontological advancement, which is the pre-Socratic claim of the meaning of life: to know thyself.

41:24 And to know thyself — it’s a different epistemological claim, which Heidegger understands quite well. It is the epistemological claim of technological advancement: channel two advancement produces the better life. That with the profusion of technology, we live better. And that’s not necessarily untrue, when you look at medicine, or you look at the ability to manufacture food for large populations.

41:55 Right? Advances in shelter, like plumbing, electricity. But these are balances that need to be weighed, not bets that need to be made, right?

42:10 And the failure to know who we are ontologically, as I discussed profusely in, I think, the first lecture here,

42:21 is the source of so much of our pain and our suffering. Because we’re making this bet in one way, without really acknowledging existence, being itself, that which we actually are — which is really the source of anything meaningful in our lives, whether that’s love, compassion, connection, self-realization, realization of existence, understanding of human being and the place of human being in the grand architecture of the cosmos.

42:49 These channel two architectures in many ways do make life better. They make life more accessible, they make life more convenient, they make the transmission and transmutation of information more efficient. They make connections where otherwise, locally, they may not be possible. Right?

43:12 But what are we here for?

43:18 Who are we? These questions remain unanswered. And as the conditions of channel two architectures accelerate and batter the walls of channel one, which cannot change as quickly as channel two can change — channel one changes occur over hundreds of thousands of years; channel two changes are now occurring every 15 seconds.

43:42 As it batters the walls of channel one, I think much of the species itself, whether consciously or unconsciously, is having the realization that this is not really advancement.

43:57 This is not really understanding. This is not really the good life, so to speak.

44:04 And we have to interrogate not only channel two architectures but channel one architectures, to understand who and what we are,

44:13 what it is to be, and what’s possible in being in a universal sense, even amidst the real situations that we are in, such as the persistence in a physical body. And what does it mean to share that condition with others? Opening ourselves up to understanding that — that we are sharing this condition, not only in a human sense, but in a global geopolitical sense, across species,

44:41 organisms, even in a universal cosmological sense. This persistence architecture is who and what we are universally, at the level of a source consciousness, if you could say that. Because think about the origin. We come from this profound channel one process of the rat in the maze, of long-term, long-scale cosmological revolution, that creates this complex being with different aspects of the brain,

45:11 digital fingers, complex organ processes which sustain themselves over tens of years. That origin comes from a consciousness. You can debate what that is, or what type that is; it’s not really relevant. But the possibility of long-time-scale evolution, glacial evolution, comes from a consciousness which is navigating conditions.

45:40 You may say that consciousness is not conscious in the way we understand it, and I would probably agree with you.

45:48 The ability for the human genome to evolve from cells and chemicals over time, in this interlocution of cells and world — even cells without sentience at any given point in time in that process. This is a process of admixing and recombination, change over time, which has then created this complex formation of sentient beings which can reflect upon themselves and their condition,

46:18 create someone like Kierkegaard who can even conceptualize that in terms of dialectical redoubling: the capacity of thought to reflect upon itself. To reflect upon man, man reflecting upon man.

46:33 And that’s the same consciousness which is producing these channel two architectures. But the question is, right, is the reflective capacity being utilized? And that’s why philosophy, right? Science without philosophy, what is it worth? Philosophy without science, what is it worth? But the two together get us closer to something like Spinoza, I would say. And Spinoza’s question is, what is being? And how can we live a meaningful life in relationship to that which we are?

47:03 And that’s my question too, because I think it is the only question.

47:10 Beyond that, money and power — these are all things that do not resolve for us

47:19 what can and does and will resolve.

47:24 Will technology, in the increase of the beating against the doors of something that can’t change but for another 200,000 or 300,000 years — is that going to resolve? Is that going to force humanity into a new paradigm? Is that even what we want? Do we know who we are enough to say we want to force ourselves into a new paradigm? Or are we doing this out of pure brute survival, without reflection? I would argue it’s the latter,

47:51 because most people don’t have any idea. They’re functioning within the channel one structure, functioning within the hardware of pure survival and persistence.

48:02 So that’s what I got, I think, here. Kind of interesting

48:09 lecture. The baseball photo stuff is really cool,

48:17 because it shows you a moment in time of a technology becoming conscious of itself through the hands of a human being. And then the energetic processes of tinkering with that technology to produce outcomes that are more in alignment with what is, perhaps — or maybe with what was best manifest in these

48:42 grainy, silver-gelatin-flecked photographs of deep contrasts. And I’m almost tempted to think the latter. Or the — yeah, the latter. Because the question of what is, is almost more so a question of the beautiful life than it is the question of the most accurate phenomenological representation. And maybe we go into that next.

49:07 But.

49:11 Our task on Earth, I would say, is not channel one architecture, which is to say genetic transformation — although maybe that may be the imperative at the level of the organism or the species. And it’s not channel two architecture, which is to say the ceaseless development of technologies in an attempt to influence

49:35 the formation of self and world relations.

49:42 I would say it is to have the full experience of being. Not just being human — being human is a part of it at this level, maybe a higher level, or maybe a lower level — but to have the full experience of being, to be present in this transformation, to be present in this process, and to know that we are that, in the Advaita Vedanta sense:

50:06 beneath and before everything. We are that, having the experience of being human in modernity, with all of the different chaoses and distractions. But to be aware of that at the deepest level, and to have that experience of being in time at the ground. This is what Heidegger was searching for, I think, at the cusp of the —

50:30 I suppose, I guess at the middle, towards the middle of the 20th century — to bring this question back, which was ultimately a question deeply ingrained in the Tao, in ancient India, and in mystical Western thought.

50:49 Meister Eckhart: how to be in relation to being to such an extent that one is entirely within being, and relationship becomes —

51:03 altogether unified.

51:12 I don’t think there is a digital technology, right? I mean, maybe there is, that makes that easier. But the reality is, we are the technology. We are the interface with existence itself, primarily. To add another structure on top of that artificially, outside of something that occurs maybe in, like, the forebrain evolution or something like that — maybe those technologies are not even relevant. We don’t know. We have them and we use them because we have them.

51:42 But I don’t think it changes the essential question. And I don’t think it changes the essential imperative of being. Okay, good talking. I will see you guys on the next one.

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4. Forebrain Infrastructure and the Architecture of Human & Cosmological History (9/12/26 Lecture)

00:00 All right, so I’m going to try an outdoors lecture. Uh, we’ll go ahead and we’ll do an advancement of the former. And I think where we currently stand is the issue of mediation, right? Between natural architecture — which we could say is the history of the human species or the human genome — and the relationship between,

00:30 I would say, what are, I guess you could say, two primary technological evolutions. You have first the evolution of the opposable thumbs, which allow for an expansion of the terrain of the organism, right? In terms of what is possible or what is doable in a physical sense in relationship to the vessel of the body of consciousness itself, right? Um, obviously the hindbrain is also very primary.

00:57 But then furthermore we have this advent of the forebrain, which is the expansion of the possibilities of recursive consciousness, self-reflection, logic chains, rationality, the attempt to map the vision of self onto the universe. And this is the history of mythology into the history of science. So the question then becomes, right, after these primary long-time-scale glacial evolutions occurring within the genome,

01:26 which are energetic transformations of the chain of information being fed through space and time — after these primary innovations emerge and they extend forward and the species itself experiments with them. Thusly, think of this as like a primarily granted technology, right? This would be a technology that is not experienced as a revolution. It is just experienced as being as it is, right? This is how perspective, or perception,

01:55 is formed and forming within the organism, within the larger

02:02 chain or span of the evolution of consciousness, or the change of information and energy over time. So when these new methods are at hand, they are engaged with on their terms, right? These limits are tested, experimented with, and explored. This is effectively the nature of incarnation: being thrown, as Heidegger would say, into the world.

02:27 And that’s the experimentation with the limitations and bounds of being an organism in space and time. Again, relationship between self and world. So when this occurs, that period of time of experimentation is kind of a latency. You could trace this all the way — I like to use Heraclitus, right? The axioms of ontology, right? All things come from and return to fire. The child is at play with colored balls, et cetera.

02:57 The fragments of Heraclitus, all the way up to and through Spinoza, Einstein, Maxwell, the foundations of thermodynamics, the foundations of quantum mechanics, the creation of the fusion device in the early parts of the 1900s. These are all advances which are outcroppings from the advances made in channel one architecture.

03:23 So this takes a substantial amount of time, right? And this is, again, I’ve discussed this or described it as a bootstrapping of consciousness. It requires many, many, many generations of experimentation with these new technologies, or new prosthetics in the human body. And this experimentation is passed down culturally, right? Through the disciplines of science, or through the disciplines of philosophy. These are then

03:53 learned and relearned through printing. So this is one of the primary channel two innovations which allows this process to occur over time. There’s the channel one innovation, which is obviously the neurological evolutions which can occur within the genome, which are somewhat closed.

04:13 Those are somewhat limited, and they’re limited by way of the larger paradigm shifts that occur in the organism itself proper. Again, the forebrain, the opposable thumb: the capacities therein can be expanded and contracted. More information, more energy is available to the forebrain — or less. The complexity of the nervous system, right? We know this and understand this as different neurological configurations, as well as thinking capacities.

04:43 So within this paradigm, again,

04:50 the technologies which allow this information, or this project of the question of being, to be passed forward, however unclear, right, are everything from fire, which allows for nutrition of cooked food, to the advancements of the plow, the advancement of the print, as I said, the printing press, even cave painting. These are methods and ways of communicating

05:19 formerly — and really what is primarily — closed experience down through space and time: the experience of the subject, which is having the hardware experience of the forebrain, right? So it’s basically before and after forebrain, so to speak, because this is when this reflective information becomes available to human consciousness. And again, why Homer is one of the primary artifacts of this process, just as much as the Lascaux caves,

05:45 a primary artifact of this process, as well as Olmec were-jaguar statues. They are artifacts of this change occurring in time, and of the species itself proper becoming aware of the emergence of this change into the fabric of the conscious mind, or the realm of experience. We have to understand this as a literal process revolution that is being experienced existentially. Again, why I return to existential

06:13 and existentialist literature as being absolutely primary to our problem here, to our question. So again, all of this is being passed down through cave paintings, through sculptures, through scriptures — all of these different attempts at compiling and elucidating

06:37 this, the information being made available through this new paradigm.

06:45 And this is what allows Einstein to say, “I stand on the shoulders of giants. I stand on the shoulders of Maxwell.” Because of course, without Maxwell’s writings, right, without the printing process which makes Maxwell’s writings and experience available, without the language which makes Maxwell’s experience available, this transmission would not be possible. And it would be left entirely to the genomic experience of Einstein to try to unfold this process.

07:14 So, this scaffolding again, two parts: channel one and channel two architecture. But when these channel two architectures accelerate, right? They accelerate beyond, like, the printing press, or they accelerate beyond these slow-time, more somatically based technologies, into the radio, into the television, into the internet, personal computational devices.

07:43 This is — I’ve already described this as a space-time acceleration. Right, this is an acceleration of the possibilities within space and time. And again, this is through lithium, this is through oil, this is through coal.

08:01 The intelligence which uncovers the possibilities in the world accelerates these technologies. And at this point, this is kind of where the strangeness enters in. And I think this is the crux of the new lecture: that the evolutionary product, or evolutionary process, which we

08:29 understand as the natural unfolding of the genome, or different vessels of sentience or transformation in space and time — when those vessels fold over on themselves and produce artifacts of consciousness and transformation which exceed the readily available — not the word for this — the readily available resources in

09:00 that evolutionary system.

09:05 We experience a change at the level of channel one architecture in relation to these expanded channel two questions and problems. And this is the condition of modernity. And this is what Marx points to. This is the kind of awakening that occurs in psychoanalysis at the period of time of World War II. This is itself World War II. What we’re experiencing is something that is,

09:34 in real time, exceeding itself through technological capacity, overwhelming itself, and coming up against the limits of the organism to process, arrange, and exchange information with the technologies it has produced, right? You could think of reading a book, or the original form of baseball, as being deeply embedded in somatic time. Right? The baseball game lasts as long as the baseball game needs to last for

10:03 27 outs and nine innings.

10:09 The book is engaged with at the speed of thought, or at the speed of consciousness, at the speed of processing of the individual. And that book is being read as a physical object which is not mediated by an algorithm or a digital screen. So, inhabiting this body of time, such as — you could say the atom bomb,

10:34 which radically expands the application of force in any one location, creating a previously hitherto unknown form of destruction.

10:46 This is itself — I’ve remarked on this before, in some of my younger and earlier philosophical works and essays and projects — as the moment in time of, firmly, there is no going back, right? Again, this is the time of television, of this new technological world into which channel one architectures are being mediated and transformed: the world of culture, the grid of civilization and globalized civilization,

11:16 that matter through advanced high-powered electrical machinery, atomic weapons which use knowledge of nuclear fusion. This is a highly advanced human culture,

11:34 which then accelerates, based on the works of systems thinkers such as Shannon and von Neumann, into computational devices. So understand these as, again, expansions of terrain into which the somatic being wanders — much like factory time at the outset of the 1900s — and becomes immersed into.

12:04 This is the primary advancement: that the human being itself, as a technology of consciousness, as a hardware — the immersion itself is into the experience of being human, the limitations and the capacities and qualities of perception made available through the nervous system and the genome and the brain, the opposable thumbs, et cetera, the organ systems. But then furthermore, there’s the introduction, as I specified in the last lecture,

12:32 of the simulation, or the simulacra, which is a space on top of the human space — which previously would have been maybe the village, or the religion, or the mythological tradition around which values were based. This actually becomes factory time, with the cement walls and the artificial lighting.

12:59 And then furthermore, right, when we extend this in space and time, this becomes the world of the internet, it becomes the world of artificial intelligence. So this is in many ways a fundamental remaking and recreation of the environment itself in which the organism is immersed, right? So when we look around at a city, or a civilization, or an empire,

13:27 with all of the different technological strata which are layered on top of the ground — which we would experience as natural existence, or the kind of Edenic, pre-technological, pre-civilizational world of forests and trees and plants and animals. That would be the channel one architecture. And then overlaid on top of that are the systems created by human beings.

13:54 And so this is a second sediment on top of the natural evolutionary structures which we experience and are embedded within. And those structures are not experienced as conscious. They are experienced as intimately a part of perception and a part of reality. They’re embedded so deeply into the body and the systems of the body that they’re just experienced as the granted.

14:21 So when this additional space is created, which is on top of civilizational space — and this is when the factory achieves hyperspace, or hyperdrive — there is now this second environment which is plugged into, which is entirely digital, which does not move at or abide by

14:42 somatic time, which is sun and moon. It harvests physical and natural resources to create this simulated space, which — I mean, you could even say the earliest version of this is cave paintings, or mythological space, or dream time, which is innate in human consciousness —

15:11 into and through the history of art in particular, including the book: the creation of simulated spaces. But now this simulated space is a thoroughly globally connected grid of information and the exchange of energy, which becomes increasingly the dominant mode of perception and experience.

15:38 And this is the larger question at hand here: that this technological domain has folded over upon itself in exponential acceleration of the revolutions that are occurring within it,

15:57 that it has now bootstrapped itself through physical space into digital space. And so the question is, how does that impact just the basic somatic conditions of existence itself?

16:14 And I think that’s where we are with this new section of the lectures. And that question is the question of modernity. And that is a unique question in human history, insofar as we are aware of it, because this space being made available

16:37 is now the space in which larger and larger portions of the human experience are now being incorporated —

16:49 whether that is the perception of self, whether that is the exchange of capital, the exchange of energy, the exchange of information. That these increasingly digitized, and thus truly globalized in space and time, societies — because they’re not necessarily located anywhere — this delocation from the body, and the acceleration of space and time inherent within that proposal, is the creation of this increasingly

17:17 third, mediated third space, which is necessarily a movement away from the primary fundamental mediation of the human body with and from being itself in a glacial time. So: acceleration and condensation of space-time through human experience by way of technological advancement. Right. And this has

17:46 always been the project of ontology, in terms of the project of the perception of being. But it has also been, in this much more material and base sense, the project of all science and civilizations, right? That they attempt to conquer ceded spaces and condense them into a singular architecture, or a singular understanding, right? And we understand this as an innate impulse in the human being.

18:17 And the question is, is that an innate impulse ontologically, in terms of being itself? And

18:29 this again returns us to the question of persistence:

18:37 the necessity of persistence in time being the fundamental aspect or character of being, and the way in which one may persist is entirely through the maintenance of the body and the maintenance of the physical form.

18:52 Unbounded persistence is just the field of information, which is,

19:00 I guess you could say, the at-large construct of the universe itself, or the formless

19:07 through which beings acquire form. The field of process.

19:16 So the question is, what happens when this environment is being reconstructed?

19:33 That is something that I don’t think can be entirely synthesized, because it is being experienced.

19:41 And that is in large part the problem:

19:48 that the question here, as with all primary ontological questions, is experience-based. It is something that is unfolding in space and time by way of this,

20:05 practically speaking, seemingly irreversible technological revolution, which only accelerates. And we see this, I think, in terms of the fundamental unfolding of the complexity of the human being in a cosmological sense: that these energetic transformations are themselves adaptive, or attempting to adapt. And what happens with these civilizational or cultural technological revolutions is that they fundamentally

20:36 create conditions of added complexity through which the being must further adapt. So you’re watching this snowball,

20:47 this evolutionary snowball, which I think really begins with the problem of existence itself, the problem of being in space and time, which is the cosmological problem introduced by existence. But then from that point, you’re watching

21:09 effectively like a necessary response to the problem of existence, which is the attempt to create and institute technologies which allow for persistence to be elongated. So when you watch Marie Curie, or when you watch the process of the discovery of penicillin, you’re watching what is effectively a natural outcropping from the fundamental existential problem, the existential condition.

21:39 And this itself — humanity having reached this point of recursion through the introduction of the capacity of the forebrain to reflect, and thus create conditions —

21:57 [pause]

22:04 — is the altering of the landscape of existence, a domain of which

22:13 formerly was ruled entirely by the natural evolutionary — which is to say the unconscious evolutionary — process of the formation of beings and structures in space and time, which we would just call, maybe we could call that, Edenic nature.

22:36 So.

22:41 That is really the point at which

22:51 really the technological revolution that we experience as modernity — and everything from the factory and the coal mine all the way down to artificial intelligence and rapidly synchronizing global and even outer space digital networks — become inevitable. And they become inevitable because the forebrain

23:19 expands the solution space of the problem of persistence.

23:27 The expansion of that solution space is the opening up of the terrain of critical thought. And that thought is not equally available to every ecosystem or every epoch, as we well understand. The realizations of Maxwell were not available in the 1500s, just as much as the neurological body of Maxwell is not available to the average person. But

23:55 the opening up of the paradigm of that technology, right — in the same way as the creation of digital space itself proper, we can think of it that way in a cultural-technological sense — is the opening up of an entire plane, which is why I say paradigm shift: an entire plane of possibilities which furthermore simply just did not exist, by way of the lack

24:23 of this foundational hardware technological system through which being could experience itself and attempt to solve problems at a higher level of cognition, or awareness, or consciousness. Right? And this is why I speak of the technology of consciousness,

24:45 the technology of sentience, we could say.

24:49 And that is primarily — when you look at the foundation of these spaces, you see the end of an epoch between fire and the industrial revolution, which I would say is really the formalization of thermodynamics: the unity of primal fire-making with the principles behind fire-making, which allow for the steam engine, et cetera, et cetera.

25:15 The end of that epoch, which we could almost say is the Newtonian epoch of physical objects and opacity to the principles of creation, into the quantum mechanical epoch of Fermi and

25:35 globally interconnected hyper space-time internet, right? The simultaneous digitality which we experience as the world in which human beings now live, from sunrise to sunset, past sunset into the next sunrise, right? That somatic time itself has now been broken open, not only by the light bulb but by the always-on global city of the internet, and the always-on global library

26:05 of artificial intelligence.

26:08 That change, again, as we’ve discussed, is a deep exceeding of the channel one architectures,

26:20 and pressing up against the limits and bounds of being a somatically, neurologically embodied being with a deep space-time ancestry, which was reliant, for thousands and thousands of years, upon the rhythms of the seasons, the rhythms of the sun and the moon, which were really the existence of the being in space and time through natural space and time. So that’s the production of this artificial digital space,

26:49 and the increasing inhabitation of that, we could hypothesize, necessitates a transformative shift in the genome, right? An adaptive shift in the genome. And people will conceive of this as a shift in disciplinary priorities, or focus and attention, but fundamentally what it is requiring at the transpersonal level is the fundamental altering and shifting

27:18 of the ecosystems in which human beings inhabit and conduct life, through this entirely artificial simulation, which is a harnessing of physical and natural structures to create this third space —

27:35 which will inevitably rebound upon the genome and require new evolutionary adaptations, much in the way of something like an ice age. But this is being manufactured by human beings. And again, we see these consequences in the ecosystem in terms of the changes in the climate itself, by way of the harvesting of these physical and natural resources and releasing them. Sort of in a Pandora’s box effect, but in relation to natural gases, or —

28:05 This is a release of latent energy in the earth, and not only latent energy in the earth, but latent stellar energy in nuclear fusion, into the surrounding space. It is effectively tampering with the grounds of what was the formerly Edenic reality. Once that process has begun, you can see this as being cosmologically ordained because of the advent of the forebrain:

28:32 that is an entirely natural unfolding and outcropping of hundreds of thousands of years, millions of years, of transformation, which creates this new solution space possibility, which is harnessed by everyone from Eichmann to Donald Trump to Spinoza to Heraclitus, Plato, and Socrates. And this is an entirely manufactured world

29:00 created by this recursive level or mode of consciousness, which is available at various different levels of sentience, which means various different levels of understanding or perception. But this is now the new paradigm in which the species at large is perceiving and acting — although obviously at various different levels of latency and cognition, right, clarity.

29:30 So you have those two jumps, right? The jump in the channel one architecture necessitates, almost

29:39 pre-motivates, the jump in the channel two architecture, which we experience as the digital reality, which is now fundamentally in conflict and in conversation with the lag, right, the latency or the lag in the channel one architecture of the somatic body, which operated by sun, moon, agricultural, agrarian, nomadic time, seasonal time, for thousands of years, hundreds of thousands of

30:08 years of natural, cyclical, predictable, long-time-scale movements — with the exceptions, obviously, of natural disasters which would occur in the environment, the splitting of Pangaea, right? These different things that were occurring, which played substantial roles, obviously, in how the genome changed over time and how it needed to adapt. Right? All of this history gets to the point of the advent of the forebrain. But then, after the forebrain,

30:38 there’s this additional sedimentary layer, which is the manufacturing — and you could call it artificial, but if you look at it cosmologically, it’s a natural unfolding — of this scope of manufactured, industrial, electrical, atomic technologies, which are the creation of a new grid

31:01 of reality and experience, which itself is fundamentally changing not only the channel one architecture of the genome itself, through epigenetics, but furthermore the ecosystem in which that channel one architecture exists. And so that radical strangeness is the base and foundational character of modernity. We experience that radical strangeness because we are experiencing an organism which is coming increasingly up against exponential,

31:31 almost quantum revolutions in technological capacity in a channel two sense, which is forcing and breaking this cyclical somatic natural time, both ecosystemically and by way of a force which I don’t think has genetically ever been applied by a species unto itself. If you can understand that: this is a force being applied onto humanity by humanity. An existential

31:59 pressure of technological revolution, which is metallic or digital. It’s not natural, but it emerges from nature. You understand this both in terms of consciousness and in terms of the resources being harnessed therein.

32:19 So then you see this high strangeness which is so characteristic of modernity, and only accelerates from the time of Gogol and Tsarist Russia into 2026 — which

32:35 is everything from Beckett to the name of the weird pharmaceutical corporation which developed this strange drug that nobody really understands, even what it does, and has a ridiculous name, and the corporation that produced it is legally classified as a human being.

32:55 To understand this high strangeness is to understand this natural revolution — I’m arguing it’s so deeply natural that it’s hard to even become conscious of it — from the originary technology, which is made possible in a cosmological sense by the forebrain in the human being, which then leads all the way up to and through the contemporary moment of

33:19 the human attempt to adapt to something that nobody is really in control of, or has control over. And this is kind of the deep aspect of what is happening in modernity: that this is a process which has been unfolding as a consequence of a baked-in cosmological technological revolution of the species itself, and the hardware possible within the species neurologically, for hundreds and thousands of years now. And this

33:48 process — every single step taken within it, every periodic revolution, whether that’s philosophical, ontological, scientific, even the historical revolutions, right, as much as they are not entirely conscious of what’s going on — are movements of the exchange of energy, the awakening of humanity to the underlying foundational precepts of

34:16 what is occurring cosmologically, which humanity experiences as reality, or history, or human experience, right, which are perceived of to whatever degree of limitation they’re perceived of from and at. But this — what is actually occurring — this realization would not have been made possible. And if what is actually occurring were not actually possible or available, technologies which

34:46 function practically over time scales, not just by coincidence or chance, right — this is kind of the foundation of the scientific method — these technologies would simply not be available or possible. And therein humanity would remain in this pre-modern state, maybe, let’s say, the agrarian state, and have maybe the occasional mechanical revolution, such as the horse-drawn plow.

35:16 But you can see how necessary the scaffolding and the bootstrapping of these technologies is and was, from the foundation of the forebrain. Then you have this capacity for recursive thought, which is the advance of language, the written word, the necessity of reproducing the written word, which is now a new symbolic construct alongside the genome. Language itself is in many ways the externalization of the genome:

35:45 the attempt to transmit information across time symbolically,

35:51 energetically in many ways, right? That the persistence of the book is the persistence of an energetic form in space and time. Paper. Ink. So,

36:04 this unfolding in the gradual iterative process, which is passed down from generation to generation. Again, this is not only the passing down of the genome, it is the passing down of information culturally, civilizationally, and ontologically, scientifically, which is increasingly making available the realizations. You have the period of time of Pascal

36:30 and his advances in mathematics and science as well as philosophy. And then you have the period of time of, we could say, Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, right? There’s these different informational epochs where information increasingly becomes readily available, or radically available, due to the innovations of any given one or group of individuals at work on a problem — which very well may have not been available if not due to the work done on XYZ other problems prior,

37:00 which made this new ground visible and apparent. Again, Maxwell, thermodynamics, Einstein, et cetera. The making of these grounds apparent is all from the possibility of apparent grounds, right? Again, which returns us to the advent of the forebrain, and then puts us on this path of the apparent grounds being manifest through recursive thought: the realization of a possible internal voice

37:28 itself, which is reflecting upon experience. Everything from there to Homer, to the consequences of that realization — which is why it’s so fascinating that we have such a story as Paradise Lost, or the Garden of Eden, which is really ontologically telling that tale through a theological lens. And the avalanche of consequences from that

37:58 are cosmological consequences. They’re consequences of the unconscious kind of global mind of species evolution reaching a tipping point, and tipping over and into an entirely new paradigm, which then leads us to the species itself exceeding, or touching up against exceeding, these limits of neurological and somatic capacity to digest and ingest the massive stream of technological information and energy, which is now permeating and

38:28 permutating the environment and turning it into something entirely unrecognizable. This is anticipated by the Industrial Revolution 100 and 150 and 200 years prior. These changes are already happening in cities at scale. We see this also, obviously, in empires. You could say Athens or Rome, Egypt, the pyramid structures, the temples, right? These are all technological transformations of environments which produce real effect,

38:57 which is then experienced by the genome and epigenetically changes and terraforms channel one architecture.

39:06 And so when you reach this point of hyper-acceleration — and this is why, to me, Gogol is so critical, is in many ways, I would say, the crux of the existential literary philosophical project. It is the revelation of the absurdity of a species which itself has reached such a level of additive complexity that it has entirely forgotten what it was, if it ever knew, right?

39:32 This is the ontological break point that is inherent within modernity. It is the scaffolding and hyper-acceleration of simulating technologies, layers and layers of simulating technologies, from the empire to the factory to the radio to artificial intelligence — all of which are informational incursions upon reality, which produce new energetic paradigms, right? New paradigms of relation,

39:59 but none of which themselves necessarily tell us what it is to be.

40:05 They’re reorganizations of the ground, harnessing of energy, pressing this harnessing of energy forth into acceleration — which I’ve again described this and termed this as the real foundation of fascism. Hyper-acceleration at all costs: speed, production, utilization, even weaponization of energy, regardless of whether that’s human, plant, animal, or iron,

40:34 oil, right? The entire utilization of the cosmos for the means of technological progress. Say energetic or economic progress, consumption, production, et cetera. This is not to say that those things are not necessarily important, but it is to say that the organizing principles of modernity, especially in the production and reproduction and advancement of these technologies, and in increasingly exponential

41:03 magnitudes of interval —

41:07 this spinning out of control is a pitting directly of the limits of the human being against what are now very clearly, in a species-level sense, overwhelming possibilities of technology. And the decision is: is technology to overwhelm humanity? And that’s not necessarily — I mean, there are certainly ethical responses to that, but in a cosmological sense, how are we to know?

41:34 Because these technologies themselves, as I’ve just described, I think very deeply and concretely, are irreducible from human evolution itself, and furthermore cosmological evolution, which is to say the expansion of solution space and solution time. The human organism itself is a response to that problem of persistence at the level of cosmic ontology, just the same as the human creation of artificial intelligence

42:04 or the computer are responses to that problem in space and time. And I’ve written about this in terms of how national broadcast television of the World Series organized and coordinated nervous systems across the entire United States, via the creation of a third space, an event space, which was occurring in digital time,

42:27 advertised both physically in locations across the United States but also digitally, across the radio and television, to prepare this coordination.

42:38 You have to think about how sophisticated that is, that architecture is, in the sense that formerly, locally, right, in an agrarian sense, a religion or a cosmology or a cultural tradition within a tribe would arrange events which would always occur locally and temporally and somatically:

43:03 a rite, or a feast. Now there’s this technological advancement of digital space which coordinates events

43:15 outside of the limits of somatic space-time — but of course they occur within them, right? And this is what’s critical to understand. The human body never leaves that solution space, because there has not been and is not yet a glacial evolutionary response to the problems that have now been introduced by channel two technological evolution, which is occurring far too quickly and is iterating far too quickly for that genome, right,

43:43 for that genomic process to register in a nearly or remotely equivalent way. Again, this takes hundreds of thousands of years. So that’s the strangeness that we encounter, and the realization, I think, quite clearly, that effectively nothing is happening. And this is again the absurdity of the Gogolian aspect of modernity: that nothing is happening, regardless of how large these closed-system

44:12 instruments become, how much more they become able to process, how much more they become able to act in space and time to produce this seemingly revolutionary response.

44:29 Right? We observe in the world so much activity, so much movement of energy, right? Whether that’s harnessing oil, whether that’s the broadcast of any political speech or cultural event, however manufactured or theatrical — I would argue most of it is, right? Because we’re returning to this principle of the irreconcilable condition of modernity, and the gap that only continues to grow

44:56 between these technological advancements, which have blown up in the new scientific paradigm of atomic energy, nuclear energy, and understanding the superstructure of energetic creation and existence, and then that being put to task in the physical world. It is in many ways a maybe superficial but material mastery of the circumstances of existence, in which human beings take physical domain,

45:26 right, the domain of space and time,

45:32 therein.

45:38 This mastery itself — and again, this is my primary thing, and I think it allies pretty substantially with Heidegger — that mastery of space and time is not true ontological consciousness, which is the primary problem of existence itself. And this is why Kafka is so important here. The primary problem of existence itself is entirely unaddressed by bureaucratic, industrial, technological modernity, digital modernity.

46:07 Rather, existence is being increasingly weaponized and instrumentalized to produce faster outcomes, which are being interpreted as — or I would say confused as — efficiency, power, strength, even wisdom, even meaning, right? Even value. And this goes back to Nietzsche’s argument about the transvaluation of values as they exist in any different civilization or culture: that it is

46:36 the grounds upon which we are creating that must be examined. And that is the question. But I would say, even at a deeper level than that, it is not that we are even thinking about grounds. It is that we are intimately a part of this cosmological process, which is not actually based on thought. It’s not based on reason.

47:07 It’s not based on any decision that any human being is making. It is being dictated by the ontological character of persistence itself.

47:22 And this is what’s critical: that at the deepest, most foundational level of philosophical or ideological debate,

47:33 political debate about modernity and about the direction of modernity — if the cosmological long-time-scale precepts are examined sufficiently enough, we can see the phase and phases at which

47:58 humanity itself becomes existent and accessible as a phenomenon within the larger cosmological register, and the values that we attempt to presume, especially anthropological or anthropomorphic values, because of course we want humanity to be inherently valuable.

48:20 But we see that humanity serves a function

48:24 in space and time,

48:27 and that there is not particularly a human being

48:32 or human beings, but rather there is a phase in cosmological evolution at which the species we call homo sapiens acquires this piece of evolutionary technology which, as far as we’re aware in a cosmological or a local ecological sense, does not have a precedent — the forebrain — and then utilizes this forebrain to replicate

49:00 the structure of the forebrain everywhere, right?

49:05 And this is what postmodernism is in a cultural sense. It’s just the folding over of the capacity of the forebrain infinitely, and that infinite realization that that’s what the forebrain does and is capable of. Recursion — which I would also argue is just the cosmological principle of reproduction itself. Cosmological energy is endlessly reproducing itself in different forms, different masks. And this is the basis of Menippean comedy:

49:35 that all of the masks, as in Melville, or The Confidence-Man, all of the masks are themselves the same.

49:43 They’re just permutations.

49:47 Right? Perceived differences — these differences themselves do exist at a local level, but at a cosmological level do not, except for the stage at which they are in developmental unfoldings, which we can’t necessarily determine to be teleological or driving towards a singularity. But what we can see, to try to regionalize the phenomenon, is that the moment of the evolution of the forebrain sets into motion

50:17 the capacity for reflective thought, or critical inquiry into experience itself, which is, as I’m saying quite clearly here I think, the inevitability of the breakthroughs of science, which then become the technological, uh, changing of the dial of human experience, so to speak, which creates the digital realms, et cetera, et cetera. It’s not to say that these specific events themselves were predetermined, but rather that

50:47 this specific procession was inevitable, based on the possibility in the solution space which was made available by the forebrain hundreds of thousands of years ago.

51:02 Right? Outside of that evolutionary mutation and evolutionary structure put into place and solidified via adaptive consequence, we don’t have any of that. We are still living within the unconscious time of nature. That is itself the thing, or the force, that distinguishes humanity, and then sets into motion

51:28 effectively what we call the entirety of human history: this gradual process of realization being passed down genetically within that larger paradigm, but then furthermore culturally, civilizationally within that larger paradigm — which is to say books, information, the internet into artificial intelligence, in this bootstrapping principle and effect, which leads us to the point we are at now. And so, to examine that:

51:57 are we going to put the brakes on that? I don’t think so. And the question is, right, what is the value of human life? What is the value of human experience within this, if humanity is about to be overwhelmed by this circumstance? I don’t know. I mean, it’s not a question of humanity. It’s a question of being itself, which is why I return to ontology. To presume that we are humans is to narrow the constraint space of the literal reality that we are in,

52:25 as in cosmological being itself, and humanity itself being a phase change within that larger structure. And the human architecture, right, or the human being architecture, from the organs to the lungs to the nervous system, is itself a temporary formulation, experimentation, or phase within that larger project of being. And this is kind of where a sort of mystical relinquishment occurs, and I would argue must occur,

52:52 in terms of the large time scales of cosmology and history itself. And Percy Shelley, I believe, understood this quite well after his conversations with Godwin, Mary Shelley’s father:

53:09 that this process, cosmologically, is —

53:17 I think we like to think that human beings are in control of it, right? That we have conscious ability to transform it. But if we trace it back to its source, and we trace it back through deep time, we realize that we are emergent from it, and we are acting through it in a way that the vast majority of people are not even close to being conscious of. Not even close to the implications of. And it is still primarily and fundamentally at the level of the ontological character of being itself, as in persistence, dictating

53:45 the entire sphere of human affairs — and will continue to, unless there is really a true ontological revolution, in which case we just come into better relationship to and with it. And how rare is ontological revolution, right? Hölderlin, and I guess we could say Heraclitus, right, or Shankara. These are very rare, very, very rare, very rare phenomena in human history.

54:12 And so what I would suggest going forward here is, this process is actually enacting its change through itself by way of the introduction of channel two architectures, which are only possible through the recursive capacities of the forebrain: language, cave art, right? All of these different rational advancements, so to speak, of symbolic architectures, which are externalized into space and time, which assist in the development of the human organism itself and ultimately accelerate it

54:42 past the break point into the paradigm of absurdity and extreme alienation that we call modernity. Right? And this is the critical point at which we are.

54:58 So it’s to say, like, the wheels have come off the bus, or the train has come off the rails, or whatever the term is that you want to use. But the reality is, right, we’re living in an unprecedented time in human history, where the mechanics of what was formerly primarily a natural, slow, glacial evolution, with very, very limited channel two possibilities to influence channel one possibilities.

55:27 There was kind of prehistoric warfare, so to speak, religious technologies of mythology, which were told by the storyteller or the shaman or the tribal bard, so to speak, right? Maybe you have wheat and corn, maybe, right? Otherwise you’re hunting bison on the plains, et cetera, et cetera. So.

55:54 This was what we could almost call the boring time in human history, because there was so little dominance or strangeness of the channel two architectures to influence nature. And what has now happened is that nature is not even being influenced. It’s that the latent energetic potentialities of nature are being

56:19 increasingly harnessed and fed back into the ecosystem of existence itself, generating the Gogolian modernity of really absolute absurdity: that humanity has been rent out of somatic natural time and thrust into increasingly digital, manufactured, simulated, simulacratic time, which really the only rules it obeys is the thin veil of

56:46 thermodynamics, entropy, and gravity — which really are not even conscious in most people’s minds, right? These are the background noise of the theater of modernity, which is the conducting of an increasing energetic transformation, with the backbone of individual human persistence and survival being the same logical principles which are at work, right?

57:14 So you have these highly advanced technologies being run by animals of pure persistence, right? So there’s your law, if there is one.

57:27 The consequences of that are of course the catastrophe and the crisis of modernity that we experience, because these technologies are still in the hands of an organism that is not capable of using them responsibly, right? But these technologies themselves are the advancement of that organism, which are forcing genetic and ecological change, even Earth systems change, right? And no one’s in control of this. It’s pure chaos. The people that are producing these systems are not

57:57 ontological geniuses of the first order. They know how to manufacture and rig up systems to produce outcomes — even outcomes that they may not be sure of producing, or of what those outcomes will be. And so that is the mystery of human technological advancement, which itself is a boulder rolling down an increasingly sharp hill,

58:25 due to the increasing energetic capacities which continue and continue to avail themselves in the quantum mechanical timeline itself, which is this era that we live in, at the real break of the industrial technological age.

58:47 So, is there real consciousness there? I think the real consciousness that’s there, and has been there all along, is that universal consciousness, which is the same consciousness I’m describing that formulated the forebrain itself and has been formulating architectures through the problem of persistence in space and time for millions and billions of years. And that intelligence itself

59:16 continues to — I mean, even now, increasingly blindly — stumble through existence. And this is why modernity, I think, appears so bright and so hyper-conscious: because there’s so much information. The ontological validity of that information is effectively none, but the material and physical validity of that information is substantial. This includes political and cultural information: how and where and why energy moves, and how it continues.

59:45 These are political questions. And in a global solution space, a digital solution space, those questions are instantaneous and constant. And that is the problem of humanity’s attempt to exist in modernity.

1:00:01 And what happens after that point — I think it gets stranger. And

1:00:10 that strangeness is the stretching of the human nervous system, the sublimity of the introduction of things that human beings never had to be conscious of, nor can they really be conscious of, and the grappling with the real impacts that this extreme harnessing of energy has, in a sense of responsibility:

1:00:34 the real effects of what is being done, right? Which is the adaptation, right? It is the feeding of the adaptation of this digital layer infrastructure, industrial layer infrastructure, back into the ecosystem, where the solution space problem — however expanded by the forebrain — of persistence remains active. Because it is the fundamental question of being human in an ontological and existential sense. So that’s what I got.

1:01:02 I hope you enjoyed it. I’ll see you on the next one.

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5. World Building, Dead Souls, and the Predictable Universe — 9/14/26 Lecture

00:01 So I want to do a lecture here called “World Building, Dead Souls, and the Predictable Universe,” and with my work in science, ontology, and process philosophy, most of which I’ve discussed here I think very thoroughly. You can look back at the other videos and lectures, as well as my written works, which detail the persistence-based ontology in complete wholeness.

00:30 What — who, rather — I perceive to be the most ontologically literate person in maybe the past 200, 300 years, maybe longer, is Gogol. Nikolai Gogol. Right, so there’s the two works: Dead Souls,

00:49 and I would say The Nose. Those are really the primary two that I want to discuss today. And from this persistence-based ontology that I’m discussing and elucidating, that I’ve brought about and detailed here, which is a unity of astrophysics, thermodynamics, et cetera, creating the basic rules and regulations of the universe — and then you watch behavior, observable behavior, of characters or beings that populate this larger

01:18 ecology of being itself, that are obeying these rules: both the rules of thermodynamics, the rules of genetics, the rules of energetic heat transfer in pseudo-closed systems, right, all of these different scientific landmarks which I’ve already detailed. I’m not gonna waste my time to keep going into them. This process-based universe based purely on persistence, it produces

01:46 what I would call really the literary landmark of Gogol’s works. And the call sign of Gogol’s works is really the profound, hilarious, and grotesque hypocrisy of humanity, which really itself is a play of the survival mechanism, right? So anything that human beings say or do is reducible purely to survival and the limitations therein.

02:12 This is what Dostoevsky inherits, being the bearer-forth of Gogol’s lineage in Russian literary history — while also there’s the Ukrainian tradition, between the two.

02:34 What I think Dostoevsky struggles with his whole life is kind of this question of Christianity and God and theology. There’s this attempt to institute morality, and the complexity of morality, when in reality it’s just not really a thing, right? That you would have to have such a sophisticated grasp

02:54 of the processes of the universe, which means that this human being would have to achieve some sort of scientific or philosophical, ontological enlightenment as to the larger character at work, the hand that is moving, the prime mover, so to speak, right? Which Schopenhauer would call the will, but I think at an even deeper level myself, I would call the being at play, right? There would need to be an almost Buddhic

03:19 enlightenment at hand for there to be any sort of real morality. And the reason for this is that when you look at the history of civilizations — and Gogol’s Russian Empire, with the serfs, is an extremely important issue. And I didn’t realize, until after I finished The Soul White Book of the Dead, my attempt at a historical epic, right, or an ontological epic

03:45 in a modern sense — didn’t realize how much it actually mirrored Gogol’s Dead Souls, and his concerns with serfdom and my concerns with slavery of Black people in America. These primary concerns themselves are what you could call the basic ontological corruption behind these empires and civilizations which call themselves free, or sophisticated, or

04:08 whatever sort of delusions of grandeur that are propagated by bureaucrats and politicians and managers of these always-already-falling empires, right? And this aligns Gogol and myself, I would say, with Percy Shelley and his articulations on the British Empire, as well as William Blake. What I’m trying to elucidate here is that this requires sight —

04:36 right, sight into the programmatic or mechanical or autonomic behaviors of mankind in relationship to the real constraints, right, which is critical. My persistence ontology is an elucidation of the real constraints

04:57 on the human being and the human body which produce a predictable, rote human behavior. It essentially reproduces character at a mass scale. You’re dealing with the same person, or the same thing, over and over again. And this is why

05:11 The Soul White Book is accompanied, just prior, by a theater of masks — 15 masks of the holy fool, which I called the theater of the chimera. And the reason for this theater of masks, and this is why I brought in Menippean comedy, a Menippean kind of farce, into the picture, is because there is no real person. There is no real identity. There are these assumptions of character. And this is what’s so sophisticated about Gogol: that the Gogol

05:41 characters, or characterologies of characterologies in Dead Souls — these are simultaneously, it’s a real person everywhere, but it’s a fictional character, but it also isn’t, right? The boundaries of reality have bled through.

06:00 And this is characteristic of Gogol, right? It’s the insertion of the uncanny or the absurd into an otherwise seemingly regular environment, which makes you reflect upon the conditions of that everyday, or that sense of normalcy. Again, a question inherited by Vladimir Mayakovsky in the Russian tradition, just several decades afterwards, during the period of the Red Revolution. So this

06:23 breakthrough of Gogol’s, I would say, is fundamentally and primarily an ontological breakthrough: the realization of the fundamental character of the human being, which is persistence under constraint, which is the leveraging of an entire, you could say, predictable machinery of culture or civilization.

06:44 Human behavior within these contexts is all just a veiled — or thinly veiled, if it ever is — persistence mechanism. So when you have the onset of totalitarian or fascistic regimes, what you’re seeing there — and this is going to sound controversial, but you’ll understand very quickly that it’s not — what you’re seeing there is just a bringing to light, or bringing to bear, of

07:09 the human condition, right? These are people who are just being the reality of humanity, right? And this is what Dostoevsky is so horrified by, and this is how you get Notes from Underground, et cetera, and his whole series of epic novels, which themselves are grappling with this reality.

07:26 And it really is the foundation of existentialism, when you have writers like Céline, or Camus writing The Fall, who are also grappling with this fundamental human condition, which is really persistence against constraint inserted into this whole theatrical production of humanity. So where I wanted to go

07:50 with that

07:54 is the, I guess I would say, the horror of the predictable universe within the manufactured farce of conceivable difference. And this is what humanity excels at, right? It’s the act of self-delusion that is inherent within the survival project. And so, so many of the different mechanisms that we experience, I think, in a much more

08:22 blatant and visceral way in modernity, as opposed to the time of Henry the Eighth or something like that, is because of the propagation of these media mechanisms which document, record, and transmit events globally with substantial ease. We witness

08:42 many different mechanisms for handling this reality, including, I mean, obviously Camus’ question of suicide. You have the dissociative or hermetic response, which is withdrawal from humanity. Then you have the responses such as

09:03 human trafficking, and this profound investment in this project of persistence-based terror, right, which is really just a weaponizing of the human biology to accumulate and acquire the ends which themselves are programmed into the human being — such as, you could say, sexual pleasure, food, water, shelter, status in an animal sense, right. So we’re experiencing, in modernity,

09:32 Gogol on steroids, so to speak. It’s the absurd farce, which is made ever more apparent just by the fact that it’s consistently thrown in your face, of this real bridge and gap between human behavior and human ideological —

09:52 whatever it would be. Human ideological doctrine or proclamation, right? And this is just the absolute farce of human history, right? You have the characters who

10:03 will say whatever it is that they say, and then they’ll go and perform the same actions as the person before them. Marx talks about history first as tragedy, second as farce. I mean, we’re on like the 56th or 57 millionth time or something like that, right? But these repetitions in human history — what I’m suggesting, from a characterological perspective, is there’s not even a person doing it. There is no individual. There’s just a system process which is running like the cause.

10:33 And this is the farce. This is why I’m suggesting,

10:57 from a perspective of morality or ethics, right, you have all of these different attempts in the history of civilization. And I was going here before, but it kind of slipped my mind. Freud, right: Civilization and Its Discontents. The whole problem of psychoanalysis that emerges at the beginning of the 1900s is a response to the historical, geographical, and nationalizing problem of globalism.

11:21 Understand this, right? Because we’re entering into a new technological era where the world becomes progressively and exponentially smaller. So the problems that emerged that were formerly held in religion — and you can see this with Kierkegaard just several decades before; Kierkegaard’s psychological problem is contained within the theos of Christianity. His entire question of being, or self and world, is synthesized so thoroughly into his philosophical-theological project. The first psychologist, in many ways.

11:51 It’s similar with Dostoevsky. This is deeply embedded within his Christian Russian perspective. But in the midst of this globalization, what emerges is this interrogation into the psyche of the individual. And it’s almost like you’re experiencing human history going backwards. And this is why — I’ll explain it — because it becomes more specific, it becomes more particular, as opposed to becoming more universal:

12:18 that each individual has this individual history, which is encased in, we could say, a short genealogical time span of several generations, and then the personal experience itself. It’s a very shallow vision

12:32 of human history and human consciousness. Understand this, right, from an existential perspective. So Carl Jung is perhaps one of the only really substantial psychologists at that period of time — and I’d say Ernest Becker a little later on — who understands, at least archetypally, which is to say mythologically, that human consciousness itself is a

12:54 deep gravity well of millions of years of experience, which creates this compound being which is really just acting out its history into its present, right? The past is the future. What’s the — I said the Ian Curtis line before. It’s just a really good one, from “Heart and Soul.” So what you’re seeing, right, and this is the hilarity, because it’s so hubristic.

13:24 It’s so utterly hubristic, that you have all of these characters on the stage of history, so to speak, and they enter and they make their grand proclamation — of the emperor, or the king, or the fool, or the beggar, or whoever they are — and they have their brief moment on the stage of time, and then disappear. Right?

13:50 And this happens over and over and over again. And each generation itself is equally ignorant of the past five, ten years.

14:06 That’s it. Right? And so what we’re suggesting — it’s this tug of war, this push and pull, between what in reality is not conscious at all. Right? That

14:22 we create these identity silos, or these spheres of representation, which become the vision of the self, the political world, the civilization, the culture. These are all just warm blankets that we attempt to swaddle this consciousness in, that has no idea what it is or what it’s doing, but is enacting and acting out

14:43 this civilization. This species-level or even cosmological rule of law is the persistence-based ontology, is survival under constraint. And we know these rules. I mean, if you’re watching this, if you’re listening to this, you have at least some vague idea of thermodynamics, of genetic transformation, the basic scientific precepts which govern reality. And in reality, these rules themselves should be enough to

15:13 elucidate the character of being. And that has been my project. It’s not that we need more sophisticated, ridiculous, particular knowledges, right? We just need the foundational rules, to understand how those rules act across scales and come into an emerging sentience, right? A biological form with a nervous system, with a complex brain.

15:39 Right? These are very straightforward, simple and straightforward rules and regulations which then govern the individual. Right? But this is where the hubris comes in:

15:51 that humanity really has no desire to understand these laws, or incorporate them into an understanding of itself, because of the existential crisis that it produces. Because to understand the rules that govern the individual, you enter into the Gogolian space. The Gogolian space of Dead Souls, or The Nose, which is to say a real encounter with the bureaucratic, historical, cultural, technological artifacts which themselves

16:19 are utterly meaningless and, worse, actively destructive. So this is reckoning in America with the history of racism, or slavery, or genocide, just as it was a reckoning in Russia with the brutal greed of these serf-holders, these landowners, whom Gogol satirizes through their character.

16:41 Gogol is one of the greatest sketch artists of character of all time, and the reason why is for what I just said prior: which is, he creates this space between the real and the imaginal, and shows you the rift in time through which something greater is emerging, in a character like Chichikov, or the nose itself, in the midst of the character of Tsarist Russia,

17:09 right, all of the different bureaucratic and administrative monuments, to reveal their absurdity — the absurdity beneath them being a biological, ontological absurdity by contrast. And I don’t wanna get too deep into the literary analysis here, because this is itself, right, the deep forest, that

17:38 to reckon with it produces the greatest possible crisis. And so when we look at the span of a human life, we’re looking at the span of concessions that a human being makes and can make.

17:56 Explain this in terms of the concessions to religion, or politics, or culture, or civilization, or the mutually consented or coerced, agreed-upon cultivation of the individual, with all of our conceivably private histories and hopes and dreams. Right? There’s something beautiful to that, of course. It’s a romantic notion.

18:23 But what in reality we are experiencing is the lordship, right, quite literally, of this cosmological process in action, which is dictating at every level of human being — biochemical, neurological, psychological — the span of any action or thought that occurs during the day. It is all attempting to persist this particular organism,

18:50 right, through two ways: sexual reproduction, and survival of the organism itself in space and time. And without thorough knowledge of that systems-level process — and by thorough knowledge I mean exactly how it works, and what it’s doing, and even why, right, which are the deepest philosophical and ontological questions available, right, which are the questions of being themselves — without thorough knowledge of really what is going on,

19:19 the being is hopeless. What’s going to happen is, we may have these vague ideas of moral or ethical grandeur, or doing the right thing, or visions of the character of the individual being noble or righteous. And those are all necessary visions, because if they aren’t there, then who are we but maybe broken or damaged people, right, whatever your justification or your interpretation or logic is.

19:47 But you don’t have real knowledge of what’s going on. So the best hope, right, is to blindly — as I discussed in the last essay — navigate the maze, like a rat in the maze of the ancient primordial unconscious of nature, which is continually mixing forms together at a chemical and genealogical level in hopes of producing, right, something that is actually conscious of itself, which would itself exist on an entirely different plane of

20:17 the ability to persist, because it’s persisting intelligently. And when I say intelligent persistence, I’m talking about a new paradigm of existence. I’m talking about actually being aware of the fundamental and foundational movements of nature, the rules and laws of nature, and acting in light of them. That’s what intelligence is. But to be able to reach that point,

20:48 there must actually be awareness, right? The ability to connect the logic behind the movement of the chess pieces. The character —

21:03 the character of being itself, right? It requires a level of humility that is not available to the vast majority of people, because the vast majority of people are so self-protected, right? Because you have to protect the self to survive. To strip away the name, to strip away the convictions of the social or cultural or civilizational self, to strip away those rules and bargains and laws and artifacts,

21:33 and then to go into the actual body itself and discern this primary, this prime mover of the will, from — like, literally peeling it from the genetic, the layer of the genetic code, or the biochemical structure of the body — that takes a profound level of sophistication combined with a profound level of humility.

21:54 And to have those two resources available at a genetic level across the human species is incredibly rare. So we’re living in an ecosystem which

22:04 has to be so deeply invested and embedded in this illusionary structure, whether it’s right doing, or this religious morality which conducts genocides, or the idea of the nation being good and the other nation being bad, right? These are all childish constructs which are necessary to allow for the being to persist in an environment, a dream, an imagination, an illusion,

22:34 in which the rules — right, the biochemical rules, or the thermodynamic rules, or the astrophysical rules — are still active, right? They’re still real, right? And this is what humanity bumps up against, and is increasingly bumping up against in modernity, right? Late-onset modernity in 2026.

22:54 It’s bumping up against the reality of the rules, right? Which this reality is simultaneously Dostoevskian at the level of existential character, which is

23:09 the real face of humanity, which can no longer be hidden beneath propaganda and divine right of kings and illiteracy, right? This has been a rapidly changing paradigm due to the increasing availability of energy, which is the availability of information, right?

23:28 Not only that level, which is the existential awakening of a species which will do anything to not wake up — because to wake up means to actually encounter the self, and the violences that occur there. And it’s a real descent into the primordial body, and then the ontological body of the character of being itself, beyond the entire history of its movement in space and time.

23:51 So: the lizard, the shark, Leviathan, right, the star — what’s beneath and beyond all of that. And that’s a Vedantic concept, an extremely powerful Vedantic concept, and applied scientifically, philosophically, applied through the full breadth of these variety of different disciplinary histories, which give us each a piece of the puzzle. Put the puzzle together, we have a real picture of being operative in space and time.

24:19 You can actually understand the character, not just assume it. And so there’s this existential revelation, but then there’s also the revelation of the real consequences of the theater of the illusion. And so,

24:39 as we get deeper and deeper into modernity, which is the acceleration of energetic release, right? We’re talking about fossil fuels, nuclear bombs. It’s an increasingly higher-leveraged situation, which is to say the possibilities of creation and destruction within this entirely mythical construct. None of these people have the slightest idea how anything works.

25:04 This is a mad grasp at power, a mad grasp at status, the myth of the nation, the myth of the individual, the myth of cultural supremacy and priority, celebrity. This is all the ground level of modern civilization. Everything from social media to dictatorships to

25:29 bureaucratic power structures, right? This is the Gogolian farce of Tsarist Russia exponentially expanded, because the technological resources have exponentially expanded. The human bet on its own delusion has escalated to such a point that the possibilities of primarily destruction, but also creation, within that illusionary ontological structure — which is to just say a bubble of ridiculousness, a bubble of absurdity and farce — have

25:58 expanded to hitherto unprecedented levels, and have, as I’ve said, increasingly bumped up against and disrupted the actual ecosystem which is allowing for this farce to continue. And the farce itself, in the most barefaced sense, is persistence-based animals vaguely operating materialistic machinery

26:22 to achieve ends they don’t even understand, but they just experience vaguely as desired realities, right? So you have all of these stories about people who — their life got destroyed because they did this thing that they thought they wanted to do, which was clearly a bad thing to do, and now they’re different and they do something else. And it’s all coming from a true lack of awareness, right? And when I’m saying true lack of awareness, I’m not saying who you are as a person at the deepest level. I’m saying,

26:51 who and what is, period. There is — sure, people have different tastes and character traits, and that’s all fine. But you have no idea who you are until you understand process, until you understand persistence as a cosmological mechanism ingrained in everything at various levels of sentience:

27:18 everything from configurational persistence of a rock or an asteroid, to stellar persistence, to organismic persistence, right. To understand the ontological laws behind the — whether it’s religious dogma or scientific over-specificity. And this is where discernment and nuance are necessary ontologically. And this is why we don’t have ontologists.

27:48 The presence of ontologists — I can probably name them on two hands, maybe one hand. I would say Spinoza, Leibniz, Heraclitus. It’s such a small circle in human history, because what it requires is knowledge enough of everything that exists,

28:08 the groundswell of human knowledge in whichever epoch, and the ability to discern which pieces of knowledge are actually relevant to forming the foundational ontological body of creation itself, to finding the character of being. Of course, all of it’s relevant, because all of it’s saying the same thing. But what is the register of the law? What is the register of the rules? What are the operative scriptures?

28:38 Right? This is everything from gravity to Darwin to astrophysics, because it’s tracing how energy moves through space and time. Particularly when it gets to the point of cutting into the grain of the sophistication of organismic production in nature. This is all traceable via the geological records of Earth’s history.

29:05 We have these knowledges available to us, which is new — and it’s new as in the past 50 years, and in the nervous system sense, the past 15 years. We still don’t understand the human brain, but we do understand that the forebrain, the human forebrain, came into existence a couple hundred thousand years ago, and we understand at least vaguely how it works. Even with that vague understanding, we can reconstruct how the epochal shift came

29:36 into being after the advent of the forebrain, because a new technological instrument is available to the organism.

29:46 This is process, systems-level sophistication moving through cosmological time to understand how energy transforms. And it gets us to: when you turn on your TV, or you look at CNN, or you read all of these stories that are all the same thing — there’s nothing actually happening. What’s happening is, at the deepest level, a persistence-based organism using power tools that it doesn’t understand how to use,

30:16 through and by way of the operating conditions that have not changed for it and never will change. The only thing that’s possible to change is more sophisticated knowledge of that operating system. And then acting from a place of enlightenment in space and time. This is cosmological literacy.

30:44 And we don’t — the species does not have that.

30:49 We have, in parts, right, scientific literacy, some sort of lower-level philosophical literacy. I’m talking about cosmological, ontological-level literacy, existential literacy. And this is why I bring it back to existential literature. Bring it back to Camus, to Kafka, to Gogol, to Dostoevsky, to Lispector, to Shelley, to Rimbaud — in particular Rimbaud. Because

31:17 this entire lineage, which I would say for the most part, as I’m describing it, is a modern Western lineage of the encounter with being itself. Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night is an absolutely critical masterpiece of what I’m discussing here.

31:37 Because what is required is a turning, an about-face, of the being, the character of being, which is existence in space and time. Character of being cannot be discerned without space and time. It would exist entirely in a movementless formlessness.

31:58 There would be no character. The character itself is the manifestation of action — which then, through examination and observation of the manifestation of action in space and time at various different scalar levels and dimensions, right, from star to organism to cell, even to stone, even to the universe itself at the largest level of the concentric circle of the design of creation itself.

32:28 Observe behavior across time scales.

32:35 Right? So.

32:44 This is, as Camus put it — I’m gonna bring this lecture up again because it’s just a fantastic lecture — as Camus put it in “The Human Crisis,” in the middle of the 20th century. I mean, this is the human crisis. The human crisis is a crisis of: there’s no knowledge or understanding of being itself. And thus, how could we act in any way which is even fundamentally or remotely literate? It’s just absurd human action.

33:11 Right? But in the same breath of that absurdity, it’s predictable, absolutely understandable, and emerging from a place of what you could describe as absolute cowardice and fear, as a product of

33:27 absolutely zero understanding. Right, so you have the manufactured person, the bureaucrat of Russia, who dresses up in his uniform and walks the streets to go fill out the paperwork for some war or whatever it is. That’s Gogol’s Nose.

33:48 You have the celebrity who gets on the stage and says the ridiculous speech about something that clearly only prioritizes their own survival, but it’s being marketed as a profound contribution to culture or civilization. Gogol’s Nose. What Gogol is able to identify at a fundamental ontological level is the absurdity of humanity.

34:12 Simply, right? Because the more sophisticated technological, cultural, and civilizational devices that are acquired and made manifest, right, through the harnessing of latent energy in the cosmos, but also geologically within the substrates of the soil, or deposits, right, in the earth —

34:35 this does nothing but make the production more obscene, more absurd, more blown out, because it’s all coming from the same problem of the ontological schism between really any knowledge whatsoever of existence and the program that’s running through all beings, all humans at bare minimum, right, which effectively makes them all the same.

34:58 And this is the trick, right? Because we’re so used to the perception of all of these different populations of forms, right? And this is the funny thing, kind of, at the bottom of all of these superficial discussions of diversity and homogeneity which occur in increasingly fascistic environments — that the nations should be homogenous, and diversity is allowed or not allowed, whatever these rules are. There is no diversity at a cosmological

35:28 level. Even at a genomic level, when you’re looking at the ecosystemic presence of organisms on Earth, they’re all genomically almost the same. You’re not dealing with really any level of diversity. You’re dealing with a diversity of superficial appearances. You’re dealing with a diversity of ideological diversions.

35:56 You’re dealing with a diversity of governmental mishaps,

36:01 which are all the same governmental mishap, and they’re all the same corruption and exploitation, because it’s the same thing happening over and over again. But the terror of humanity, which is really just cognitive dissonance, is that this is all people and all things and everyone. And yet there are several different responses to that. There’s horror, there’s admission, there’s going deeper into this darkness of the crisis of humanity, which is nothing more than just the empty repetition of the same behavior over and over again:

36:30 survival, persistence, reproduction, and anything necessary to make that happen. And then all of these different dreams and delusions emerge from them. All of these different stories of life. And this is not — I know it sounds, I don’t know what the word is,

36:52 critical, or even mocking. But we have to see this for what it is if there’s going to be any sort of advancement at all whatsoever. Right? Because there is no —

37:03 I think, as Mayakovsky, the poet, began to understand later in his life, fascinatingly enough, there is no revolution, there is no change, right? All of these cries for change and all these revolutions — there’s just the same thing. It’s ideological transfer, which is really just: different words are being said, different rhetoric is being spouted, but the same principles are active.

37:25 The only possible change is actually becoming conscious at the level of the persistence ontology of creation in the cosmos itself, understanding these rules of laws and precepts, and then acting within them consciously. That’s the only possibility of ethics or morality. Other than that, it’s just a presupposition of a

37:50 vague mythological or nationalistic belief system, which can be tossed off at any given moment for the benefit of totally unconscious submission to, you know, just the process. And so when Artaud, right — I would say French ontologist of the mid-20th century — talks about endlessly shedding bodies, it’s a really powerful line in his journals.

38:20 And Bataille also gets at this as well, in the French tradition of that period of time. There’s an understanding that kind of harkens back to the Aztecs or the Olmecs, this understanding of this larger cosmological order of generative, gesticulative creation.

38:37 And the issue with Western history, and I would say the issue with modernity itself, is the total submission to this concept of subjectivity, this concept of the character, the being with all of these different attributes, which Gogol so clearly and consistently satirizes. What Gogol is suggesting at the foundation of his work is that there is no person active. It’s just an unconscious process, and all that there is to do is become wise to it.

39:09 There is no other action that can be committed in a universal sense. It’s only reaction, right? And so this is what the vast majority of humanity lives under, labors under, and dies under. It’s just a reaction to these biochemical — I almost wanted to say biocosmetic — principles, that there’s no consciousness of them.

39:34 There’s consciousness of the feelings or the desires that are created within this manufactured cosmos of the organism. And then all of these different downstream effects, such as the name, or the status, or the clothes, right? The costumes, the masks, the kind of garish dance of civilization, which always ends in tragedy: the exposure of the madness and emptiness of everything that ever occurred within it,

40:02 with the exception of maybe Goethe, or Spinoza, or Gogol, right? These figures, that they’re making a contribution, however large or however small, to a real elucidation of the characterological revelation of being itself — which is not formally possible strictly scientifically, nor strictly philosophically, nor strictly existentially, but it requires a unity

40:28 of these dimensions, and understanding the substrate characterological structure within and between all of them. And dissipative structures of Prigogine is a great example of this. But these all need to be connected to the superstructure of cosmological being itself, because everything that is emerges from the creation of the universe itself. So thus it must have a characterological root within that deep space, deep time process. That is ontology.

40:57 That’s Heraclitus, right? That’s Heraclitus’ “all things emerge from and return to fire.” What are the rules of law? Not human, not ideological. What is just practical reality? And that’s where we experience the absurdity of modernity, because it’s just the same, just the same thing over and over again. And I think that’s why it is so exhausting.

41:53 So that’s really what I wanted to discuss here. When I’m talking about world building, it’s really the imaginative farce of mankind. It’s extreme leveraging of creativity in the most dissociative, delusional sense.

42:11 You can see why it’s not, right — the creation of the human being and all the different statuses and names and all these things that people do, right? It’s not totally absurd, right? And this is the space between Gogol and just madness, right? It’s not totally absurd, because it’s all based in the unconscious, which is to say bodily knowledge

42:39 of the rules of law of nature, because the body has adapted over millions of years to survive. But it’s all unconscious. It’s beneath the level of the conscious mind, which is why you have this whole advent of psychoanalysis, which is attempting to dig into this massive substratum of the body to understand

43:09 what exactly is going on. It’s a real scientific attempt, whereas historically religion would not be so much. So this attempt, right,

43:25 is

43:28 also ultimately, in many ways, just submitted back up to the surface. Because to come face to face with the human condition — and I think I have a fair degree of a right to speak about this at this point — is

43:43 to come face to face with the history of cosmological violence that lives in the human body. This is not only the transmission epigenetically of the experience of genocides, slavery, various different calamities that occur within an ancestral lineage, but then furthermore the entire history of calamity and violence which raises the first organisms, the first cells, up from the undifferentiated water of creation — early, early, early Earth — all the way

44:13 up into the fight of various different strata and substrata and species of animals iterating themselves over hundreds of thousands of

44:23 years, millions of years, to the point of time that we’re at now. So it’s a real reckoning with the entire history of creation, even just at an Earth level, right, at a genomic level, in the sense of an organism. Nonetheless, a reckoning with the history of creation all the way back into stellar systems, and the birth of stellar systems and galaxies, et cetera. That’s the kind of consciousness that we need

44:49 to understand, right, if we’re going to understand the past and thus act from a real presence. That’s a large part of it. But what we live in, right, in terms of civilization or cultural structures, is really quite simply just manufactured illusions.

45:16 And this is, I think, you can see this fight at the cultural level, where really we live in this like postmodern society where the family, the car, the relationship, the job, the status, like all of these things are thrown into question. And the only answer that people can come up with is, there’s this other way, this other idea — but it’s all within the context of an extremely shallow conception of existence, the self, the world.

45:43 And none of it actually even comes remotely close to addressing the problem. You change your costume, right? You change your mask, and then you say this mask is going to fix it, right? As opposed to actually seeing what’s beneath and behind the mask — because to do so is to step into the terror, right? To step into the ontological terror. And in many ways it is, as Ernest Becker says, to face death. His formulation that

46:07 Western civilization is a death-fearing cult, right, and everything that comes out of it is the death-fearing cult, is very close to the source of what I’m talking about.

46:18 Because what I’m talking about is true ontological presence in space and time, and the knowledge of the character of being, and then living in light of that. And that’s just historically unprecedented. I mean, I could tell you the amount of work it took me to get to this point, in terms of actual study, to create and sculpt and craft the system based on every single rule of law I could find across every discipline that I could really touch,

46:48 to have a real picture of this.

46:54 And so it’s a question of, like, are we going to do that work? Or are we just going to be one of the bodies that shed into the abyss? And I suppose we all ultimately are, to a degree. But what measure of consciousness is possible in human life? What measure of consciousness is possible in life and existence itself? And is anything other, or anything less, than the fullest measure of consciousness worth anything? And the answer, to me, is just no, it can’t be,

47:24 because you live and die in an illusion.

47:29 And so to understand really the track marks, the fossils, right? This is a very archaeological act,

47:39 very even scatological act — to examine the track marks, to examine the fossils, right, to examine the footprints of being in space and in time, right. This is the great mistake of modern science, and how just incredibly superficial it is. It’s had to become that way, because we needed very specific granular understandings in order to incorporate them into an ontological whole. But I don’t even know if you can call that science. You can call it very dedicated study of a specific aspect of being.

48:09 But the only science I can see is ontological science, which is the science of understanding and observing creation and existence of being itself. So we’ve needed that movement, because without Prigogine, without quantum mechanics, without Newton, without this history of Maxwell, Payne-Gaposchkin, without this history of these different scientific

48:37 revelations in different disciplinary modes, it’s very difficult to construct a full-scale — like, a scalar, interdimensional relationship with all of these different aspects of being as they exist in space and time across different time scales, and to find the characterological aspects or structural behaviors within each of them.

48:58 That information otherwise is just not there. And this is part of the reason why it has taken and takes so long for humanity to get to this point. There needs to be the forebrain so there can be these different scientific disciplinary silos. There needs to be sufficiently ripe nervous systems and brain structures to examine, at a systems level, a cosmological systems level, this phenomenon across generations,

49:26 across epochs. And this transmission needs to be recorded so it can be observed and examined by the next bricklaying beings around this question of being itself. So from that perspective, it’s very easy to see why we are where we are, why religion plays such a big role, why nationalism plays such a big role,

49:51 why the divine right of kings plays such a big role. Because these are all poor, impoverished substitutes for real relationship to being.

50:01 Everyone is allowed to have their story. Everyone is allowed to have their personality, their belief systems, whatever.

50:10 But we’re talking about real relationship to being. It needs to be practical. We need to actually know what’s going on. But the refusal — and I think it’s not only just a refusal, but it’s an inability — to know what’s actually going on creates this surfeit of responsibility, surfeit of real character, right? Real courage or real goodness, that we experience in the world as maybe corrupt, or fallen, or whatever word you want to use, precisely because

50:40 of this incapacity.

50:45 And when you see the characters of Gogol, I think especially in Dead Souls or The Nose, you’re looking at this mix between the pitiful and the committed, right? They’re both pitiful and committed, because they have to be to survive. So you look at the modern world, right? These different figures who have cemented themselves in these different behaviors and

51:09 projections of self into world, to acquire resources, or to proclaim themselves as being this, that, and the third thing. These are all pitiful behaviors that are ultimately necessary at the level of the organism which cannot and does not understand, and at a certain level unconsciously has submitted to that. So at the depths of that, there’s a profound, I think, sadness.

51:37 And I think that’s what we see on an everyday basis, however much it may be covered up by these masks of conviction and confidence that you see in these people who are wavering at the edge of the abyss, right? Because there is no ontological ground, and that’s the secret, right? And so when you see the death of civilizations or empires, what you’re seeing is the death of the false,

52:00 plastic ontological ground crumbling out from beneath the feet of those who invested themselves in it, because that was the structure of dependence. Right? You can even see this in family systems: because there is no ontological understanding, we’re looking for some sort of second-order foothold.

52:19 And I think this is what, at the end of Gogol’s life — there is the conflict where a priest tells him that Dead Souls, which is really his farce of these landowners who own serfs, really just calling them out at a civilizational and existential and even spiritual or religious level, just calling them out — this priest says that this is corrupt work, or satanic work, and he burns the second half of Dead Souls and

52:47 effectively kills himself. And what you’re seeing there, I think, is a really powerful moment in terms of where Gogol is, because there’s a seed of truth in what the priest is saying, in the sense that this pity, this misery of the manufactured delusional, illusional history — or illusional, delusional

53:15 culture — of these people who are just lost. These landowners are clearly corrupt. They’re clearly murderous. They’re falsifying taxes to own what are almost slaves. Russian serfs. They’re not slaves, but it’s pretty close. It’s also what you see in America at the same period of human history. And you have this corrupt

53:45 constitutional document, “all men are created equal,” written by slave owners, many of whom — or several of whom — raped their slaves, right? You’re looking at this

53:55 criminal, corrupt, decadent farce. And Gogol has the courage to call it out. But at the same time, right, you’re looking at a species that is so corrupt and simultaneously so broken, that there is an aspect of wrongdoing in what Gogol is doing with Dead Souls, in the sense that he is satirizing these miserable, existentially sick and broken criminals, right?

54:21 Something that I’ve thought substantially about as well, even just in terms of literary work that I do and am doing.

54:32 To see that whole picture, this picture of human destruction and calamity and brokenness that emerges from a failure to understand at the level of the persistence operator — or that persistence under constraint is the rule of the universe, and that all beings and all forms act under it — then there is the substantial, or the greater, understanding of the farce, why it exists. It doesn’t

55:01 decriminalize any of these actions. They’re just as criminal, miserable, and pathetic as they ever were. Right? We’re looking at these actions that these governments, or these landowners, these just corrupt people, right. But to see that picture is the beginning of a different paradigm of human existence, and the only way forward, in my opinion — I could be wrong — but if the

55:31 rules of law and regulations are not actually understood at a cosmological level, there is no real possibility of meaning. There’s no possible right action, because there’s no possible conscious action. Right action is just something you strike upon accidentally, because you’re a blind creature in a maze that you don’t understand. You don’t even understand who you are, where you come from.

55:57 And this is why the universe itself is simultaneously predictable and extremely strange. Or the human universe itself — and I guess I can say the universe itself. Simultaneously predictable and extremely strange, right? We have the stellar laws of gravity which create these extremely regular celestial movements, or like

56:19 neighborhood solar system movements, et cetera. Galactic movements that can be understood, and the trajectories can be understood in space and time rather clearly.

56:31 When you get to the level of the thermodynamic, genomic organism, especially humanity, right, with the forebrain, what you see is simultaneously the strangest possible world and the most regular possible world. Because what’s beneath the strangeness of McDonald’s, and these dictators of these made-up nations with made-up names,

56:58 made-up codes of conduct, most of which they don’t follow, right? They just say that they have it. And then they have these elaborate stories of how everything came to be, and why they should go on a genocidal pilgrimage to wherever, right? That these elaborate structures are the attempt of an organism becoming sentient to

57:22 permit itself, right, to allow itself to do these actions, which it understands, I think maybe at one level, to be entirely criminal and broken. But on another level, it does it because it’s so immersed in this survival construct. And maybe there is no understanding of how

57:40 broken and criminal and corrupted it is. But it doesn’t really matter, right? Because these actions are being committed nonetheless, through these ideological justifications, right? Through these stories, these narrative systems of: these are the things that I’m doing, the family, the nation, the religion, the uh —

57:59 culture, the status, the job, right, all of these different things that I’m doing within this manufactured system, which is being agreed upon en masse, or coerced upon en masse, to survive, to reproduce, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, right? So that’s the whole thing.

58:24 And so you’re watching this just survival, reproduction, persistence-against-constraint superstructure manifest itself over and over and over again in human history and cosmological history. Unbroken. But the illusion itself is that there is history, right? Really, what you’re looking at is a cosmological process which only really evolves or changes over massive time scales due to

58:52 evolutionary or revolutionary paradigms,

58:58 which are in large part brought about by adaptive systems in space and time in the organism, in reaction to or in response to environments. That’s the really critical understanding that needs to happen here. So the world building that occurs around that entire terrain — which you can understand even in the past 50,000 years as the human being, right, or human history — is itself the great farce of belief:

59:27 the necessary farce of belief that allows this machine to keep turning and to continue as it must. Right?

59:52 The farce is entirely necessary,

59:57 when you see that what would happen beneath the revelation of that farce is that the behaviors themselves would entirely have to change.

1:00:07 You introduce real ontological ground to a species which is operating upon cultural or civilizational or religious constructs, which all return themselves back to one thing and one thing only:

1:00:22 persistence of the individual organism against constraint.

1:00:29 All of that falls apart, because it’s no longer believable. And that’s what you experience in modernity. You experience, due to the onslaught of information, which really overwhelms the subject, right — neurologically and psychologically, existentially, to the point of crisis, overwhelms the subject — and tears apart the very system that has been attempting to manufacture it.

1:00:57 You have the pressing forth of technological instruments which produce such energy, such force in space and time, that it is itself almost an existential obliteration

1:01:14 of the organism. And that’s why you see in such an environment such an ideologically fascistic response: because it is the principle of extreme self-conservation becoming active in a world of energetic transformation which is increasingly threatening the border or the boundary of the organism itself, which is the body. Constraint. Persistence.

1:01:45 What’s fascinating is this is all necessary, as I discussed in the previous lecture, along with the advent of the forebrain. Because once you have the advent of the forebrain, you have the ability to inquire into nature, inquire into self, and then you have the necessary downstream progress of science and philosophy, the transmission of that through channel two architecture, which is the handing off of information

1:02:12 through — whether it’s through books, whether it’s through the internet, whether it’s through all of these different vessels, which effectively replicate genomic transmission of information over time.

1:02:23 And you have the breakthroughs that occur with energy, which are then incorporated into the very unacknowledged, latent, superstructural ontological problem, which is really only addressed by humanity’s greatest minds, and is just left off the table everywhere and in everything else, because in reality it’s simply too complex,

1:02:49 when the most immediate pressing problems of existence can be addressed through fast food or social media, right? These digital structures which can be easily utilized and instrumentalized to acquire basic resources. It’s like a squirrel collecting acorns. And that’s the vast majority of what you experience at a species level, albeit through increasingly sophisticated and advanced forms of technology, which is transformation of information and energy

1:03:18 across increasingly narrowed gaps of space and time.

1:03:26 And there’s your crisis, right? And it’s a crisis of extreme violence, because it’s a crisis of extreme efficiency compounded with an extreme ontological stupidity.

1:03:45 Just because you’re able to do something doesn’t mean you have any idea about what it is you’re actually doing, or what the consequences of what you’re doing is or are,

1:03:54 beyond the fact that you feel a vague call that you can’t understand and you don’t know, that emerges from within the body, which then becomes metabolized into a series of thoughts, which are then —

1:04:07 whether they’re justifications, rationalizations, or whatever it is — are downstream chains of information which are further pressing you or encouraging you towards the point of fulfilling your dream, or your desire, or whatever it is. And entire billion-dollar industries are built off of this. These are the corporate humans, the corporate human entities legally.

1:04:35 And that’s the world that you live in.

1:04:40 And that is the Gogol, the Gogolian, the Gogolian absurd.

1:04:49 Yep. I think that’s pretty straightforward. All right, thanks for listening.

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6. The Pure Theater — 9/15/26 Lecture

00:01 So there’s several different layers as to why things are happening. When I was very young, it was always my intention to understand how things work, why things work, et cetera. And for me, at a young age, it was very difficult to separate someone like Chekhov, or the works of Freud, from

00:30 physics, or the sun rising, et cetera, et cetera. And at this point I think there’s kind of a new chapter to these lectures, and to this ontological pathway we’ve been carving, which I suppose I would call the pure theater, or the total theater. And

00:57 the first thing that concept kind of reminds me of is Artaud and the theater of cruelty, and his attempt to reinstantiate a kind of performative, imaginative space. A space of movement and action, synthesized space, which would return the sacred to Western culture and Western civilization.

01:21 So what I want to discuss here are the multiple different layers. And I think we’ve gone quite well into the ontology of persistence, how it pertains to stellar physics — this kind of stuff, for me — all the way down to the human being, whether we talk about cellular action, or stellar physics, or the history of the cosmos,

01:51 or even, you could say, flora- and fauna-based ecosystems on Earth. These things, to me, are much less interesting than the existential theater, because they’re predictable. The processes themselves are not the paradigm shift. The paradigm shift itself occurs within the human existential condition, which we’ve articulated extremely well in the forebrain lectures.

02:20 And what I want to get at here is, I keep having this kind of press in the unconscious mind towards Rimbaud, or Chekhov, even Samuel Beckett, Céline, Dostoevsky, Kafka. This is the lineage of existential literature. Sartre’s Nausea, right? The book.

02:48 Camus, The Fall. The lineage of existential literature, which to me represents something in a cosmological sense, a paradigm shift in the cosmological sense, towards recursive perception, as in the revelation of persistence ontology. And I’ll allow a bit of personal experience here.

03:12 These were the first books, the first texts — regardless of discipline, anything from science to philosophy to literature, cosmology, mythology — that grabbed me as a young person, and they still do to this day. And I think in large part, after going through these different disciplinary silos and listening to and accepting the terms and conditions that they present,

03:41 the reason that they still do is because they’re primary records. They’re records that, I think, especially with Rimbaud, A Season in Hell and “The Drunken Boat” — what they are is primary records of consciousness attempting to come to terms with its history:

04:02 the history of life, the history of the emergence of sentience, the history of the emergence of civilization and religion, which creates the cultural cage of onset modernity that Rimbaud steps into. We know — I’ve said this before — Rimbaud attempts to become a member of the Paris Commune as a very young person.

04:25 So he’s stepping into the maelstrom of history, and this is primary to Marx, it’s primary to political economy. I would say it’s even primary to psychology, primary to philosophy. It’s the experience of the organism, in a Heideggerian sense, being thrown into existence. And the emergence of that organism

04:48 into the various different substrates which it inhabits. One being the biochemical substrate — and there I would just also throw in the nervous system, and the prosthesis of the brain, and the opposable thumbs, et cetera, the technology of the body. But then furthermore the historical, cultural context, which in Rimbaud’s case would be Paris

05:15 in the emerging modern period.

05:22 And then you have, of course, the family religious context, which for Rimbaud is Christian. Right, so this is Rimbaud’s very integral and authentic encounter with all of these superstructures, which he is coming to grips with and actually encountering in an existential way. And this is why I’ve spoken about Jung before as being a really critical interlocutor in this whole history of disciplinary silos, in the sense that

05:49 Jung is not really a psychologist as much as an existential theorist, so to speak:

05:58 encountering existence on its terms, and allowing his relationship to this emerging possibility of psyche — which is to say the forebrain and the hindbrain, the technology of the mind, conscious and unconscious, ancient and somewhat contemporary in terms of the emergence of the logical faculty — to show him what life is. And when I read

06:28 Chekhov or Beckett — and here’s where I think the theater really comes into play, in terms of an aspect of importance — it’s everything we discussed in the last lecture in regards to how the conditions of modernity emerge, right? The multivalent

06:52 layers, which is the organism acting unconsciously out of its biological casing, which it perceives to be reality, right? There is no — for most organisms, there is no real recursive thought. And then when there is, it’s usually thrown off of the track of examination into religious dogma,

07:20 a faith-based center which really contains a community, which has long been the history of humanity: that the community itself is the cultural center of the cosmology, right? The myths and the legends and the belief system which actually holds the tribe together. They all believe the same thing, so they’re all having the same experience of reality.

07:44 That’s not it. And

07:50 this experience, right, which really is itself the center of survival and survivability — right, we can see the emergence of nationalism as just a bigger, more abstract container for this fundamental religious theology of the tribe,

08:13 and all of the different cultural artifacts that come with that in terms of economic beliefs, right? The social and institutional systems which uphold and transmit the information around that belief center. What we’re talking about is an ontology which has been projected outward from the vision of the self into the theater of the world. And I’ll bring this back to Gogol, because Gogol is quite simply the primary example of this phenomenon,

08:43 in The Nose, where the nose itself, the character in the book,

08:51 satirizes the entire bureaucratic, aristocratic center of Russian ontology, so to speak. And when we’re talking about ontology, we’re talking about the perception or the character of being, which is being acting as a central organizing force. This is simultaneously religious

09:17 and, I would say, political, in terms of bureaucratic, the structure of social governance, as well as the structure of the perception of the self. And the world that we live in, as it always has been, is a world of pure theater around the attempt to centralize these constructs, because these themselves are power centers, right, in terms of perception of being.

09:45 And in a human sense, this is why most ontology is just pure artifice: because the ontology itself is assembled for the benefit of the individual, or the benefit of the collective which it supposedly is representing or advocating for.

09:58 These are stories of creation and destruction. These are stories about the central character of being, and thus how the world itself should be organized. So this is really the undercurrent of all human history and human politics. It’s ultimately a religious or theological center of the character of belief, or the belief of the character of being. And this is why I call human history pure theater:

10:25 that the only operative condition or circumstance within the theater of human history is the ontology of persistence, or persistence against constraint, in relationship to the very real physical processes of the biological organism itself. This is entirely individual, right? Each individual has this locus of persistence, which is the foundation of existential literature.

10:49 Right, whether we’re talking about Notes from Underground, or we’re talking about A Season in Hell, or we’re talking about The Fall by Camus — this is the hallmark of existential literature: that there is an individual describing their movement through space and time and encountering this necessity of survivability. Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night is also a great one. Not only encountering it within themselves, but witnessing and observing it within the world, with increasing clarity

11:17 and some mix between horror and absurdity and farce. Sartre’s Nausea is the documentation of this process of revelation, or stripping away, of the manifold kind of cardboard-and-plaster smoke screens of civilization and culture, to reveal the fundamental existential condition, or the fundamental ontological condition, of being itself to the narrator and thus to the reader.

11:46 Notes from Underground, another great example, right? So when we’re looking at the hallmarks of existential literature, we’re looking at the hallmarks of a new paradigm in human history — and I’ve already described this quite well in other essays, so this is kind of the difficulty, we’ve tread this ground.

12:05 It is a paradigm-shifting moment in human history, of the unmoored modern individual, or unmoored modern organism, encountering civilization or culture as an alien force, right? In a non-ideological, non-doctrinal way: a consciousness that cannot be assimilated into this fabric and thus is in some sort of relationship of conflict or contrast to it.

12:31 Again, Gogol’s The Nose being one of these hallmarks. And you can see also the entire oeuvre of Kierkegaard. But this is not really philosophical literature, but in parts, right? Kierkegaard does tell stories. It’s primarily a philosophical document of Kierkegaard’s observation of consciousness itself, including his multiple pseudonyms, et cetera. So.

12:57 This pure theater itself — and this is why in the past I brought up Menippean farce — is the, and again, as we detailed in the last lecture, the comedy and tragedy

13:13 of the commonplace, or the milieu, so to speak, of any given time, any given age. And this is why there’s kind of a wink of the eye behind looking at Hegel’s philosophical concept of history, as well as even Benjamin’s, I would say, to a degree, in terms of the angel of history. That there really is no tragedy in the movement of time.

13:39 There’s tragedy in the repetition of time from the unconscious. And this is why in the past I’ve evoked Marx’s “first as tragedy, second as farce,” from The Eighteenth Brumaire. And the Eighteenth Brumaire itself, talking about the costumes of revolution and the costumes of aristocracy, I believe strikes quite close to what we’re talking about. But Marx is still looking for

14:07 liberation from within this paradigm.

14:13 [pause]

15:00 So — and this is the issue, and again, I’m gonna keep saying this, so I apologize in advance, we’ve already discussed this — this is the issue with ontological diagnostics in human history: that so much of human history does not achieve that center. So when we’re talking about Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire, what we’re really talking about is Marx grasping

15:30 an aspect of what is going on, but it’s still being reduced to the same historical materialism that, to a degree, we’re talking about with Hegel, or we’re talking about with Benjamin, in the sense of: history itself is a real body, and it’s not an imaginal body. There is a real movement in history, and it’s not a dream movement being conjured up by the failure to understand the ontological center of existence itself. And this is where I deviate from Marx and

16:02 most of the history of human thought. There is, again, as I’ve said before, there’s nothing going on. It’s a theater of persistence, which is generating and regenerating the necessary conditions of power, control, manipulation, bureaucracy — which are satirized in Gogol — to allow for the persistence mechanism to function to certain degrees, and at certain qualities, for certain groups of people,

16:32 depending on whatever sort of specter of the ideological locus of any given civilization or culture. This is anything from slavery in the Greek, to the Egyptian mythology, to

16:48 the caste system in India, to the French revolutions of Rimbaud’s time, and then into the 1960s, the student revolutions in the working time of Debord. This is entirely conjured. And the issue is, it’s a battle over imaginal constructs, and these imaginal constructs have clear historical, political, and physical force.

17:17 They produce real effect in space and time. And so the war over the theater is

17:27 what we observe as human history. And it’s necessarily never-ending and ever-ending, because it’s coming from a place of such profound ignorance, stupidity, and farce, that we’re not even at the place of a real ontological recognition of existence, creation, and the fundamental rules of law that bind all of existence together, and in the understanding of this higher law.

17:56 Right, and I’m not talking about a divine law. I’m not talking about teleology. I’m not talking about any of these manufactured constructs. I’m talking about the literal glue of space and time and existence itself, in terms of persistence against constraint, which is reducible at

18:15 a multitude of different levels to firmly documented physical processes. And this is where humanity is unmoored into delusion and illusion. It’s not necessarily to rule out any of the specters that haunt humanity, all of these different specters of ideology and religion and these constructs of beliefs, but it is to say that what we know is where from we should proceed, not what we believe.

18:43 And this is difficult for most people to accept.

18:48 It’s the basis of science, and the basis of process philosophy, which is ultimately higher science — as well as process philosophical ontology, which I would say is the highest science. So in this pure theater, there’s nothing to do. And I think this is where we get the sense of ennui which permeates the mid-century

19:19 tradition of Western philosophy:

19:23 anything from Camus to Sartre to — I would say particularly the French. And this is still, I think, an unconscious process within the French, and you see this in the schism between Camus and Sartre regarding politics. There’s still this sense of historical agency which is being debated in Western philosophy in general.

19:51 And so much of Western philosophy is ultimately political philosophy, in the sense that the philosophical claims which are being made are, to a degree, either for or against empire, or are attempting to abstain from the discourse of accelerating colonialism and accelerating feudalism, et cetera, as well as the

20:16 slave state in Greece — you could say the slave state in Tsarist Russia, in terms of the serfs, right? Gogol’s most famous and most essential work, I would say, Dead Souls, is explicitly addressing the hypocrisy of the serf owners in Russia. And this is what so much of Camus’ work is based around: the interlocution of

20:44 metaphysical, philosophical thought in politics, and the essential binding force therein. It’s also what you see in Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night. It’s irreducible that philosophical thought emerges in history and in time. But there is a certain point ontologically

21:05 where this space of the pure theater is encountered. And

21:15 the pure theater

21:22 is ultimately ahistorical, it’s atemporal, and it’s based in the fundamental irreducible human condition,

21:32 which manifests itself over and over again in space and time, over tens, hundreds of thousands of years — long past at this point the remembered or catalogued dial of human history — and will continue to the foreseeable future, unless there is further revolution in the literal infrastructure of the human being. We talked about this in terms of the forebrain,

22:00 the primary technological artifact of human history. The thing that differentiates — when I’m sitting here and talking about stellar physics, or sitting here and talking about cells, it does very little for me, because these processes are so tightly bound to the process ontology of existence itself, persistence. But then you have this counter-force, which I think reaches its height in Camus, which is existential literature:

22:31 a kind of Jobian realization of the human being in a reflexive way toward creation, or toward existence, which brings about the essential questions of existence, including suicide, including the meaning of the human being, what is possible within a human life, right? These are the hallmarks of existential thought. And this is really the sign

22:58 of a true revolution in human history, toward the direct encounter of this timeless and eternal force without the guardrails, or guide rails,

23:13 of civilizational cosmologies,

23:20 which are really religious and mythological forces which are directing human behavior to predictable outlets based on belief — the belief that these stories are true, or real, or functional, et cetera. So this direct encounter is extremely difficult to stabilize, because it really is kind of the modernization of the prophetic encounter of old, whether that’s Abraham or Isaac or

23:47 Moses or Ezekiel, these kind of old Hebrew prophetic figures: of creation without a theological backdrop, which is to say a way of categorizing or marking these experiences. And this is why Rimbaud’s voyage into seership is so fraught,

24:19 [pause]

24:28 because these figures, right, that I’ve brought up are attempting to encounter

24:37 creation and existence itself in an authentic, integral way, in an embodied way — direct encounter of the organism,

24:48 without theological container, in secular modernity, in an environment of empire, in an age of empire, in an age of increasingly consolidated cultural forces, which are regurgitations of the primary failure, which I spoke of in Ernest Becker: the primary failure to encounter

25:17 mortality, right. To encounter death, to encounter the real constraints of the organism persisting in space and time. And to understand the foundational ontology beneath space and time — and again, this required substantial scientific work in Western civilizational history, much of which, including neuroscience, was not available until 10 or 15 years ago, as of 2026. So

25:47 this is a brilliant strategy of attempting to survive in conditions which don’t make sense. And so this is why we have the emergence of Camus’ absurd. Camus, I think, becomes very close to the persistence ontology — not necessarily from the scientific perspective of “these are the real ground rules of the physical processes of existence across space and time in a cosmological sense,” but rather the consequences

26:16 of human civilization and the technological revolution of the forebrain in relation to the ontological foundations of existence themselves.

26:28 And what I mean by that is the conjured world of the pure theater, which is all of human history, all of human time, all of human action, which is the thinly veiled cloth or plastic laid over the reality of the human condition — which is unchanging until a further paradigm-shifting revolution in said condition. Which again, I gesture back to the forebrain.

27:08 And this integral encounter is an encounter of great courage. It is an encounter of individual courage to look the abyss, or the void, directly in the face. And we see the kind of early onset of this, this kind of action, with Nietzsche, who takes this step, I would argue, beyond Kierkegaard, in dropping the

27:31 theological garments of his civilization or culture and stepping directly, increasingly, out of mediation — whether that’s symbolic or mythological or even linguistic mediation — into this encounter.

27:47 And we see the consequences of such encounters throughout human history, including particularly Rimbaud and Nietzsche, Artaud as well, attempting to encounter this raw force of creation without symbolic mediation. And this is precisely why we experience the cultural theater as necessary. Right? The pure theater as necessary. Because to step into this encounter requires such

28:17 resilience,

28:21 such, like, true character, right, beneath the manufactured character of status and confidence men, as in Melville too.

28:34 To have and hold this encounter without the guardrails of a mirror, as in Perseus with Medusa, right? To encounter the real kind of gorgonic face of creation, the raw bare face of persistence and constraint. But furthermore, the acuity to see how persistence against constraint is unified across spheres — it really is the character of existence and creation itself.

29:00 But to actually observe this character is to step into relationship to it and with it, beneath and between all appearances. And so what you see in the theater of human civilization — the awards dinners, the self-congratulatory medallions, the wars waged in the name of empires, the cultural artifacts of self-congratulation, et cetera, et cetera:

29:31 these are nothing more than the closed-circle attempts to justify or prop up this surface-level, agreed-upon refusal to examine the real conditions of existence themselves. This is why existential literature stands in such bare, kind of bare face to the vast majority of human history, which is an unconscious and,

29:59 maybe barely conscious, half-conscious repetition of survival behaviors, which are then encoded into cultural artifacts, right — language, mythology, etc.

30:12 And these may be good-faith encounters, or good-faith attempts to come into relationship with being,

30:21 but they themselves are not in relationship with being. And this is kind of the hard fact of process ontology in history: that relationship with being

30:40 is always simultaneously a matter of what is historically available. So when we think of Heraclitus as maybe the ancient ancestor of process ontology, nothing of thermodynamics was yet available, nor astrophysics. The revolutions of Kepler, Copernicus, or Galileo, those are still far into the future. But

31:04 Heraclitus, with what is available to him, still recognizes and realizes characterological, ontological precepts which still hold to this day. It’s perhaps the most fascinating element of this whole procedure. It’s similar with, I believe, Adi Shankara and Abhinavagupta in the Indian tradition. These are first-principle realizations made with existential technology,

31:34 that is to say being in time and observing being in time. So this is an eternal process of paying attention and observation, in the sense that we’re realizing timeless precepts that extend across space and time, extend across scalar dimensions of existence, that are themselves the character of being. And that there is, in a Vedantic sense, or even in the Spinozan sense, one being,

31:59 but throughout these different spheres of relationship being manifests itself in different ways, but always abides this central structural code. And so, beyond the entire theater of history —

32:13 which is to say the endless repetition of these same behaviors which generate the entire fabric of culture and institution and civilization, which is humanity itself convincing itself that it has done something, or it knows something, within its own self-congratulatory sphere of relationships, which is to say pure survival — this is kind of the hidden lineage of the process of the self-realization of creation through its manifestation.

32:44 And this is extremely powerful. This is what I mean by beyond the pure theater. And this is why, when we look at human history, we see such an embarrassing poverty. We experience this in our very existence in these modern times, just as we did in ancient times,

33:07 in that this lineage of these authentic, integral

33:13 attempts at the encounter of being itself

33:22 is the real movement of history, I would suggest. There has been no real movement otherwise. You could say, of course, we’ve had things like penicillin, which prolong the human lifespan, various different advances of convenience, food technologies, which of course prolong the human lifespan. But again, these are circumstances and instances of prolonging something that we don’t understand and have no relationship to.

33:48 And our earliest and even our most advanced mythological traditions — whether you want to talk about the Christian, the Tao, the Egyptian, the Greek — these are all formulations of cosmologies which themselves are not entirely ontologies, because they are stories about being.

34:09 But are they descriptions of the character of being itself? And this is why, when we look at the Heraclitean fragments, we’re looking at some of the most advanced artifacts of human history. Some of the earliest recorded representations — with figures like Anaximander —

34:31 some of the earliest recorded representations of observation of the character of being across all spheres.

34:42 And this takes incredible resources. And it also goes against, in any given paradigm or zeitgeist, everything that any given civilization or culture believes, desires, or pretends, which is the pure theater.

34:57 Because the revelation of the ontology of being is the cosmological singularity of the character of existence itself. It has very little to do with the pure theater of culture, human culture of any time, which is manufactured to cope with, for lack of a better word, this profound failure of relationship to being, which is the state of the vast majority of human history.

35:27 So when we have, again, these award shows, or these elaborately literal theaters — right, and I’m not talking about Greek tragic theater, I’m not talking about Aeschylus, I’m talking about Hollywood, right, these very elaborate constructs which we experience exponentially so in modernity. We go from, let’s say, the Tudors or King Henry to

35:55 celebrities and fast fashion, right? All of these different distractions, as T.S. Eliot would say, characteristic of industrial modernity. This just profusion of these different garments and stories and

36:12 pieces of information that are thrown at you as fundamental compensations for the poverty of the time. The poverty of the civilization, the poverty of the empire, and the poverty of human history — none of which can provide you real recompense in relationship to the most important relationship, which is to say yourself, or being itself, right? Which is all things, all places, all times. It is the overarching character of existence.

36:39 These compensations are anything from a nationalistic war, to a religious fervor, to an industrial product made in Indonesia, to a cell phone, to like a stuffed animal toy that becomes an obsession, right? We move from obsession to obsession, each of them with their own

37:04 little convincing gravity and degree of seriousness, which is anything from a religious story to like a Furby or something like that — which are all compensations, which are all mediocre and really deeply pathetic attempts to recompense human existence for the void at the center of all culture and civilization, which is the ontological failure

37:33 replaced with commodity empire.

37:39 And this is, I think, pretty well understood by the Frankfurt School, and Benjamin, Adorno, et cetera.

37:48 But this understanding — which is again why I don’t really gesture to philosophy as being much solace — this understanding of what is going on, which I would again say is characteristic of Camus or Sartre, this understanding of this nausea of modernity, this profound dislocation from being itself, which is to say this ontological lineage, doesn’t really appear anywhere but at the fringes of history. With Spinoza, who I believe was a shoemaker,

38:18 right, or a watchmaker. With Heraclitus, who was effectively a beggar at the Temple of Artemis, I believe, playing dice with children.

38:29 These characters, who are really at the absolute fringe of civilizational histories, themselves perform a profound linkage, a historical chain of ontological investigation, outside of which there is only the theatrical performance of the poverty of human history: which is the cultural theater, the civilizational theater, the theater of war and empire and power, status and strategy.

38:57 And in that theater you have maybe the absolute maximum, or the theoretical maximum, of said theater or civilizational

39:07 apparatus, which is a philosophy of history, which attempts to gather back together this entire performative nothingness — which is really just a series of reactions and compensations — into a narratology to explain why religion, or why culture, right. But none of those things actually breach into ontological realization, which is to say the character of being, which is entirely above, outside of, and beyond this play of forms, which is the perpetual bickering of

39:37 humanity over resources, land, presumed property, power, control, status, etc. Which is really just animal behavior. And this pure theater, to bring it back to Gogol, I think is an unbearable and hilarious farce simultaneously. And this is why they also call Heraclitus the Weeping Philosopher,

40:01 why Spinoza is excommunicated from the Jewish community and works, I guess it was, as a lens grinder.

40:08 The profession is to suggest that Spinoza had an extremely marginal profession in relationship to his real character. It’s that the ontological investigation does not have a place within civilization, or a place within humanity. And the reason for that is, it is fundamentally against everything that humanity is — which is to say, again, a compensation mechanism, a delusional, imaginal production system

40:37 to compensate for its profound failure to realize relationship to being, and everything downstream from that, from romantic relationships to cultural relationships to, you could even say, religious relationships, right? All of these downstream effects of the failure to have relationship to nature, or to world, or to other, are all

41:02 artifacts of this primary failure of relationship to self, for that matter. So you see the self-help industry, or the psychology industry — these things all flourish in the alienated modernity, which is not alienated in the way in which Marx suggests, in terms of political economy. It’s alienated at a more profound and even deeper level, in terms of relationship to being itself.

41:30 Political economy emerges naturally from relationship to being. But without relationship to being, political economy will simply just be material. It will be empty. It will be form devoid of substance, which means it’s just transactable. It has nothing behind it.

41:50 So humanity itself is in this perpetual hamster wheel of attempting to form relationship to being through commodity culture, through religion, through civilizational allegiance, right? And

42:09 all of these different compensations, by their very nature, by their very necessity, cannot provide true relationship to being, because they are downstream emergences from that initial necessity to compensate.

42:26 Because if relationship to being were present, there would be a real critical ontology at the foundation of civilization and at the foundation of human history. But instead it continually emerges that the fringe of human history is marginalized, and is often excommunicated — as in the

42:43 case of Spinoza — in the name of the reaffirmation of the very compensations which are generated by human history and human culture and human civilization to cope with the failure of relationship to being. Which is to say, the acculturation to these forms, their traditions and their rituals, is primary to the actual

43:09 attempt, or the search, for being itself — the actual critical search for being itself. That this is not actually a process that humanity wishes to undergo, in the vast majority, right, excepting these ontologists who do actually descend into this primary relationship to being, this existential relationship to being, and actually interrogate it at multiple different levels and dimensions. That what humanity desires is the appearance of

43:37 this process, which is to say the artifact without the necessary labor, right, or the necessary discipline. And this pure theater is everything that we observe in modernity, from Ozempic to fast fashion to

43:55 gambling, right. And when these cultural technologies accelerate — slavery is one of the best examples of this in human history — when these cultural technologies accelerate, as they always do, anxiety in relationship to being has ratcheted up in intensity in history, and this usually signifies a fragmentation of civilizations and a fragmentation of ideologies, including and primarily religious

44:21 theological backing, the backtrack to human history. These are the relationships,

44:31 or really the lack thereof — the propositions of relationships — which undergird and allow for the human being to exist in space and time at a degree of, maybe at best, low-level anxiety in relationship to existence itself, and these kind of primary questions such as life and death, and who am I, what am I, what is the purpose of existence, right? These things exist in a low simmer when there are cultural, civilizational, political,

45:01 and religious artifacts which create the appearance of ontological relationship. And this is what’s so critical here. And this is really what we’re talking about when we’re talking about ideology. It’s a deeper definition of ideology. We’re talking about the cultural artifacts which are created in surfeit when there is no relationship to being.

45:27 And because there never is anyway, so we’re talking about all of human history in surfeit to relationship to being, in absence and in absentia. We have religion in absentia. We have civilization in absentia. We have culture, right, in absentia. We even have science — because with these artifacts, with these technologies, with these imaginations, right, in absentia we have the Western self,

45:55 with the name, the number, the status, as in Gogol’s The Nose. Because in absentia, we

46:07 are so deeply imaginative. And this is what’s so funny: that the very capacity which has been fostered over vast evolutionary swaths of time, vast evolutionary periods of time — this capacity for imagination, critical reflection — is being used as a diversion. One of the greatest unwritten

46:33 philosophical, fictional novels of all time is quite simply the creation of the character, the modern character. It has been written so many times — I’d say particularly Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground is a great example. But the creation of the person, the creation of the individual, with all of the desires, the drives, the conception of self, the personal history. Not that these things don’t necessarily exist, but they are not the fundamental character.

47:03 So, in absentia, this pure theater has to be crafted with the absolute conviction of one who at foundation is desperate. And it’s so unconscious and so pernicious that we simply take it for granted, for normalcy, or reality.

47:21 Um.

47:24 Right, and this is everything from the marble halls of the capital of empire to the private relationships which are based around extraction, right, or transaction — the marketplace of human affairs, the billboards, the advertising campaigns, the massive sacrifice of personal dignity in the pursuit of capital, the one god, right, which is just pure materialism.

47:55 And these things stand in relationship to ontological interrogation as artifacts of the pathos of human history. But a pathos that is so pronounced, so sculpted, that one almost has to ogle at it as a mere transcendental artifact of artifice:

48:17 the most profound artifice, which is an artifice of ignorance and delusion and desperation, right? An empire built out of profound lack of relationship to the most essential aspect of creation itself. So that’s what I got. Hope you find it interesting. I’ll talk to you later.

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7. Mistaken Valuations, Existentialist Literature, and the Biochemical Response to Space-Time — 9/16/26 Lecture

00:01 All right, so I want to talk to you today about existentialist literature, and this concept of mistaken valuations and biochemical hormonal responses to space, right?

00:32 Just getting those keywords down there. And again, I will return to — we’ve woven through biology, we’ve woven through ontology, we’ve woven through cosmology. I’ve gone deeper into astrophysical processes in my essays and operator manuals, so to speak. But we’re just gonna return to the forefront, the evolutionary forefront of

01:01 the cosmos, insofar as I can, or I think we can, understand. Which is the document of existential, or existentialist, literature, existentialist literary philosophy. So I’ll give you a vague idea, right? Kafka, The Trial. Camus, The Fall. Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground. The Nose, or Dead Souls, by Gogol.

01:28 Beckett, Waiting for Godot. Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H. Rimbaud, A Season in Hell. Those would be call-sign documents for me for that epochal unfolding. Sartre’s Nausea as well. What these documents all have in common is — again, this is

01:51 ever-present in my unfolding theoretical work, and documented in the operator manuals as such. The genre, the object, or the artifact of existentialist literary masterwork, such as the ones I’ve listed, is simultaneously a crafted aesthetic object, right, which is to say the actual document, the book itself, the symbolic binding

02:21 of the pages, which then contains therein the subjects of the consciousness’ encounter with increasingly lucid or abstracted grounds of consciousness themselves. And by lucid and abstracted, I really mean the same thing, and I will explain why. These documents, in terms of the vividity

02:48 in the space-time track of their details — which is to say, it is a consciousness moving through space and time and detailing its experience. This is critical. This is what separates it from painting, or even music, right? Wherein music, the detailing of the experience is not a description, but rather it’s an inscription of notes which themselves do not have an interpretive base or foundation in a spoken or written language, which is to say the experience of the subject. This is where I would distinguish

03:18 it from something like Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, which I would also call an existentialist document, but it is not itself moored to a literary convention, or a linguistic or literal convention, of the communication and articulation of thought and experience in a translating or translatable fashion. A Love Supreme is effectively untranslatable outside of the inscription of the notes which are being played,

03:46 in terms of an understanding of that experience. And that’s a really deep discussion that you can get into semantically, but that’s not what we’re here for. So, to return to this existentialist literary document, being an encounter beneath the surface, or the slipstream, of space and time, of the character of being —

04:12 this is what distinguishes existentialist literature from maybe the works of a Vedantic sage or a Taoist sage, which we’ll also go into. It is a going beneath that slipstream of time to

04:32 find the character of being beneath the biochemical hormonal response to space-time, which is itself the mask of the human being. And so when I say mask of the human being, I simply mean the form that the human being incarnates in, which is the very form that makes available existentialist thought

04:55 and literature, due to evolutionary conditions in the biome, right? The nervous system, the synapses of the brain, the forebrain, right? The process that we’ve detailed previously, which takes hundreds of thousands and even millions of years to construct, this infrastructural

05:19 possibility which then becomes recursive thought, as detailed by Søren Kierkegaard, one of the earliest existentialists and psychologists, in his kind of theologically laced encounter with being, which he calls dialectical redoubling.

05:40 He actually gives this a terminological basis. He’s describing the possibility which becomes available — he calls it theological, and he’s correct in the sense that it’s being reflecting upon being in a more fundamental way. But he’s describing the making available of this process

06:04 in terms of the forebrain technology, which is the technology of recursion, or logical or rational thought, the technology of reflection. And we’ve described the entire span of history which emerges from the advent of the forebrain to the present moment. We’ve already gone through that. So we’re on and forward into the schism of existence itself,

06:30 which is the modern condition — and it has been the condition of humanity since the advent of the forebrain, which is also what we’ve called Paradise Lost. I talked about that in terms of Milton and the Garden of Eden: consciousness that emerges, which is the tree of knowledge, or the garden of good and evil, whatever you want to call it, which is all ultimately interpretive valuation, which we’re going into,

06:54 of the emergence of this technological process. Good, bad, evil, Satan, God, whatever. It’s all interpretive. The reality is that it unfolded naturally from the cosmological process of being, which is to say the character of persistence, navigating constraints in space and time and adapting

07:15 to the world around it through iterative processes, which we would just call reproduction. Iterative attempts at being, which is to say to remain in space and time, to persist in space and time within the inherent constraints of space and time, which is to say the form, the entropic universe, et cetera. And the rules and regulations therein, including gravity, the loss of heat in pseudo-closed systems, et cetera.

07:42 So these mistaken valuations are precisely the state of the fall, which is described by Milton in Paradise Lost, which is the gravity of the body — which is to say the body is seeing primarily, right? The body is seeing primarily and responding primarily to sight in circumstances, which is to say food, water, shelter, reproduction, which is to say

08:11 bare survival, pure persistence, right? It is the hindbrain universe. The animal existing in space and time, and that which must persist no matter what, right? So you have the emergence of a faculty which simultaneously extends persistence — the forebrain, right? Logical, critical thought, the ability to reflect and thus change action, anticipate action, reflect upon action, past, present, future, right? All of these possibilities that emerge in this plane

08:40 of forebrain technology. But simultaneously, right, it critically interrogates the hindbrain epoch, right, the ground from which it emerges. It is actually able to look back into that ground, which is the reflection of the animal upon itself in a being sense, which is the foundation of philosophy. It is the critical ontology of existence itself, reflection upon being. And we see this going back into biblical stories such as Job.

09:09 All of the Hebrew prophets have this in common: the voice that they hear, in a Homeric sense, it being the voice of God, or whatever that agency is, is they’re hearing this emergence of this creative capacity, which they’re reflecting upon. It’s really the emergence of mind as we understand it in a modern sense. So when we talk about hearing voices, or hearing the voice of God, or

09:36 these sorts of things — even memory in a Proustian sense, right — we’re talking about a dialogue between the body, which is to say the hindbrain epoch, everything that came before rational thought, and this emergence of a new plane or new terrain of possibility or criticality, which is now taken for granted as, like, quote unquote, the logical conscious mind, which we could just call the forebrain

10:05 possibilities and capacities therein.

10:09 And this becomes the new ground of existence. However, right, how conscious is that?

10:20 This technology is really, for the most part, being used to affirm uncritically hindbrain imperatives, or purely somatic bodily imperatives. So the continuation of the organism — this new technology which actually existentially threatens the continuation of the organism. You understand this. This is why

10:46 this might even be a critical interrogation of Camus’ philosophical foundation of suicide, as it is — I would call it almost maybe a modern technological condition, the possibility of suicide. Where does that reside in the spectrum of emergent technologies which can consider suicide as an option? Do you understand what I’m saying? That the forebrain as a technology is not, and has not been, fully

11:15 furnished in the human being’s conscious experience, but rather it is being implemented, or existing, as supplementary to this hindbrain experience — which is something like what Nietzsche would call eternal recurrence of the same: that we’re living in this totally subsumed, subconscious domain of the animal,

11:42 which is enacting and reenacting the same biological, hormonal, chemical responses and precepts which have existed for hundreds of thousands and millions of years, without really making any progress, so to speak. So the idea of progress is really what separates philosophers such as Hegel from Nietzsche’s ultimate commandment. And

12:08 this, the revolution of Darwin, is what stands unspoken in this whole explosion of philosophical thought throughout the 1800s and into the 1900s. I would say really throughout the 1800s, when we’re talking about the philosophy in Jena — or we’re talking about, I guess particularly Jena, when we’re talking about German idealism, which is

12:37 really the essential fabric of modern Western philosophical thought,

12:43 the base. Everything from Hegel to Kant to Nietzsche to eventually Heidegger. The Germans are doing so much of this foundational philosophical work in terms of the ontology of being, including Hölderlin.

13:02 These mistaken valuations I’m trying to speak about here — and I’ll bring it back to existentialist literature — are themselves only mistaken at the juncture of critical thought, which is to say at the juncture of the self, or self-reflection. So we have this experience which I think is endemic to modernity, and only accelerates, which is an experience of mistaken identity:

13:28 which is to say the politician is not who they say they are, the lover is not who they say they are. It is the world of con men, again, as Melville would put it. And this is what we see as the essential fabric of American culture, in terms of being at least — as it claims to be — a secular nation full of vaudevillians and kingpins and con men,

13:55 grifters, etc. This is so embedded, characteristically, in the American consciousness. Figures such as Al Capone, the carnival — these are very archetypally early modern American concepts.

14:21 Even the clown, as we currently understand it, is an American archetypal image which has been overlaid atop a vast substratum of other archetypal images, such as the holy fool in the Russian tradition, or even the schlemiel in the Yiddish tradition. So what I’m trying to speak about with this

14:48 is, the existentialist literature is a response to the increasing unveiling of history. And we talked about this in terms of the technological epochs. And this is an aesthetic or auratic phenomenon, to gesture to Walter Benjamin, in the sense of: it is the increasing enlightening of history

15:13 without enlightenment, which is to say that history itself becomes brighter and brighter.

15:21 I would call it the fulmigation of consciousness. The contrast is turned up to a near unbearable level due to technological innovation, which simultaneously colors on the opposite end of the spectrum of this high-gradient, high-resolution imagery, this factory of forms, all of which disappear into light and shadow.

15:56 [pause]

16:44 And this technological ability, as I’ve suggested — not suggested, articulated —

16:56 in terms of the channel one and channel two architectures. Again, I’ll just do a reiteration. Channel one is the genome, right? It is the evolutionary faculty of this primordial persistence character of nature, of being. And then channel two is the faculty which emerges prosthetically through it. And prosthetically, I mean metallically:

17:22 that which we typically call technology. I’m saying channel one is already technology. It’s the technology of being itself, the intelligence of creation. Channel two would be the internet, the cell phone, the light bulb,

17:38 even mining or harvesting coal, right, to power cars, right? This is all technological prosthetic. So this acceleration of heat and energy and movement and transfer, at least on a world stage — which is to say the stage of the self’s relationship to the sphere which it encounters every day — accelerates exponentially.

18:07 And this movement is just a further inoculation of this binding of the forebrain and hindbrain, which is to say the epoch of the hindbrain is never interrogated, but the forebrain is simply incorporated into hindbrain logic, which produces the Nietzschean kind of eternal recurrence, which he articulates standing on the cusp of modernity.

18:37 Which — when I’m saying modernity, I’m talking really about the possibilities and capacities of consciousness exponentially expanding, not only, again, right, due to this channel one architectural change, infrastructural change, of the advent of the forebrain, which was in existence for hundreds of thousands of years prior, which moved, I would say, quite slowly, due to the kind of surfeit of scientific and technological innovation which explodes

19:06 between Newton and Planck and Fermi and Einstein. And the influx — even talking about Carnot, or Clausius, or Maxwell — of technological products which emerge from the scientific evolutions and revolutions of the industrial age

19:27 into the digital age, which is to say Shannon or von Neumann. That these scientific revolutions then themselves are birthing new energetic epochs. But when we enter the quantum mechanical age of science, these energetic epochs explode in exponential force — i.e., the atom bomb.

19:47 So again, this is why I’ve described the creation of the atom bomb as being a paradigm of almost an entire enfolding of the history of the unconscious creation of the universe into this moment of terrible, or terrifying, critical self-reflection, or lack thereof — which is to say the recreation of the power of a star. Right? The essential force which powers the entire domain of this unconscious nature, which has been for

20:15 millions of years, billions of years, slowly fattening, or ripening, or fermenting sentience possibilities in organismic forms, and iterating them through time through biochemical equations. As I’ve described, this consciousness being like a blind mouse in a dark maze, grappling with possibilities to allow for the extension

20:43 of this being form — which is to just say anything that exists, or anything that has come into existence. You could argue whether that’s on purpose or by accident. It’s very difficult to discern intention. What I’m talking about is phenomenologically, across scales, describing the character of being — the character, which is to say being able to discern what being is doing through movement in space and time,

21:11 cross-dimensional scales, planes of existence. So these mistaken valuations, which are really important to existentialist literature and existentialist literary philosophy, they really are the backbone of when you read a text like Sartre’s Nausea, or you read a text like Rimbaud’s

21:59 A Season in Hell.

21:59 What you’re reading is a consciousness which is breaking through this veil, which is a multivalent veil, which we’ve discussed in the past. It is the veil of culture. It is the veil of religion. It is the veil of civilization. It is the veil of familial belief systems and family structures. It is the veil of all of these different apparatuses which emerge from

22:27 the biochemical hormonal response to space-time, which is to say the incarnate presence of the human being and the dictates that occur therein, which is to say survive, reproduce, right? These dictates which are taken as fundamental, which are taken as primary, right? These are just taken for granted — and the way of seeing which is embedded into the very hardware of the organism neurologically,

22:56 to create and allow for and sustain this process with as much indefinity, or infinity, as possible.

23:08 So this is embedded fundamentally in the sensorial domain of the organism itself. It is the situation in which the human being is, or lives, which is to say the human condition. So this itself is what has powered millions, even billions of years of evolution and revolution and persistence, if we want to talk about cosmological space and time.

23:33 It is what incarnated the species of the human form, and it is what ultimately created the forebrain technology. But we are now at this crux of hyper-accelerated technological incursion into that domain, as well as through using this technology — again, which is why I gesture to these figures in history who have left symbolic artifacts, anyone from Maxwell or

24:02 Carnot to

24:06 Rimbaud.

24:09 Is that this bootstrapping effect of consciousness, that exists in the interlocution of channel one and channel two paradigms, has hit and is hitting a critical mass, in the sense of: these biochemical hormonal responses to space-time have long existed in a veiled sense. And what I mean by veiled is that the necessity from which they emerge has not been entirely understood, and the responses

24:38 that the body or the mind articulates toward them, in them, and through them have been to all effect automatic. And with a kind of critical inquiry into the nervous system and the brain, right — how these systems interlock with each other to produce responses and experiential realities,

25:04 how they themselves are architectural gradients which manifest themselves similarly but differently throughout different beings in a population of organisms —

25:17 the production of this experience, especially when properly synthesized with biological, chemical, neurological, and cosmological realities, is a theater of experience which is created by a technological device in a certain state of biological evolution, or Darwinian evolution, or thermodynamic revolution across space and time,

25:43 which is producing, consuming, articulating, and experiencing information differently. So this is just an understanding of complexity, which for an adolescent species is difficult to understand. It’s a novice terrain. So when we have the existentialist literature, it comes about in modernity

26:09 because of the split between channel one and channel two architectures, which is to say rapidly accelerating technological modernity — all of the artifacts that come with it, the photograph, the television, the radio, industrial civilization,

26:22 mining, factories — throwing the somatic animal body out of sun, moon, seasonal time, into factory time, and then furthermore into digital time, which creates this increasingly profound sense of severance and alienation described in Marx in relation to industrial labor.

26:41 Marx understands this somatic intelligence in a somewhat fractured political economy way, but what is being experienced in reality is a very bodily dislocation from existence itself. It is a second Eden, so to speak — the Eden of somatic existence, of

27:05 the being within the intelligence of the universe which created it. And now the being itself has recursively folded over, is now using the steam engine, is now using coal, is now using oil, is now using electricity to build a simulated epoch of consumption, production, productivity, culture, which is effectively, say, a

27:34 sedimentary layer plastered over the still-existent somatic gravitational time of the cosmos itself. So what is then produced is this sphere of human experience, which I would argue is

27:53 emerging from sophisticated neurological forms, right — that the people who previously would have been maybe philosophers or poets, ensconced within a civilizational time of equilibrium, which is to say a civilization living in at least a feigned connection to nature,

28:18 these would be the medicine people of these civilizations, the scribes, or maybe the prophets, right, that are in relationship to being by nature of their nervous system configuration, by nature of their somatic body — and experience this rift with the force of a physical wound, right, because it is a physical wound. It is the removal of somatic space-time which previously regulated

28:48 thousands and thousands of generations of iterations of human beings. This is the nervous system technology itself. This rift, which exponentially fragments due to industrial and digital technology, which creates an entirely different world of experience and an entirely different time that one lives in: increasingly accelerated, compressed, condensed, simultaneously globalized and singularitized,

29:14 when we talk about artificial intelligence or immediacy of communication of information across the bounds of space and time. So this fracture is recorded by existentialist literature. But really, in reality, what is occurring with existentialist literature is the combination of modernity with a faculty which has existed for

29:37 tens of thousands of years, really. It’s the faculty of the shamanic impulse, which is to say the descent into the substrate of being, which exists across all cultures, everything from the Vedanta to ancient Aztec civilization. The descent through the garments — which, in the Sumerian sense, it’s the story of Inanna stripping the clothes of the world to descend to hell to retrieve her sister, I believe.

30:06 The emergence into the naked encounter with the consciousness of being itself, which is revealed in varying different ways to be hell, to be demonic, to be a beast of creation. But I think at an even deeper level, as I’ve described it in my works, to just simply be an unconscious blind force which is desperately attempting to learn how to be, or continue to be.

30:33 We can see this throughout the history of cosmological time. The history of cosmological time is the history of this being, of this force, of this essential nature. So the shamanic figure, the medicine person, is in contact — I’d say both naturally, through neurosomatic configuration and sensitivity to being itself, which is to say just sensitivity to being existent,

31:01 with that force — as well as maybe through training, through medicine, right? Through techniques which, even in the modern sense, we understand as coherently as Breton and the surrealists doing automatic writing, right? Or Carl Jung’s descent into the unconscious, or the collective unconscious. It is this attempt to recover

31:29 ontologically being itself from behind these kind of masks and cloaks of pseudo-physical identity, pseudo-individual identity — the person, or the subject, which, as Western modernity progresses, right, must necessarily become increasingly solidified in order to extract value from, right.

31:53 This is the great death of humanity which we witness before our eyes. It’s the solidification of the subject as the presumed identity of being. When in reality, right, for thousands of years, across traditions — the Tao, the ancient Hindu,

32:12 different pagan traditions, the Greek esoteric traditions, pre-Socratic — understood ontologically, right, through ontological research, which is research into being itself, what is being: that the identity of the self was something far more expansive, universal, and eternal. But if this identity is to be as such, it shatters the

32:40 glass ceiling of materialist consciousness, right? As we’ve discussed previously, it’s that this being — if this being is something eternal and universal, and it is that which one is, right, it is a process which cannot be fragmented into individual forms, but really that itself is the illusion, or the delusion, as described in Blake:

33:08 that if the narrow chinks through which the man gazed were seen, or if the world were seen as it really is, infinite, that it would be a revolution of man’s perception. What he’s describing is the buy-in of an entire civilizational mode, which is then globalized, which we could just call Western modernity, or the factory, or the

33:36 instrumentalization of nature, which is, as we’ve already discussed, the utilization of non-critical forebrain to continually instigate the hindbrain universe,

33:55 which is survive, reproduce, survive, reproduce, accumulate, ingest, consume. These are the essential hindbrain dictates, which are the high dictates of modern civilization. We can see the foolishness of that, right? There’s a technology which is not being used, but at the same time we’ve invented these incredibly sophisticated technologies, everything from nuclear power to artificial intelligence, all of which

34:24 have been nothing but a continuation of the hindbrain epoch — except for these figures that emerge in existentialist literature and philosophy, which are and who are critically interrogating through the lens of modernity, which is to say the hyper-accelerated industrial and digital technological age of civilization and culture and globalization. Interrogating through this

34:52 exponential mask of forces, confusions, characters, and con men, these games of consciousness, interrogating the ground from which it all emerges. And this is the absolute ontological necessity, existential necessity, of existential literature and philosophy as we experience it in Camus, or Sartre, or Rimbaud, or Lispector. It is an attempt to gain back the ground of being amidst conditions which are

35:22 ever more, and even unprecedentedly, adversarial to a real ontological existence, a real existence within and at the ground of being itself. And this is what returns us back to the biochemical hormonal responses to space-time: that as this technological epoch accelerates, the

35:49 mistaken valuation, or the mistaken identity, is already a product of hundreds of thousands and millions of years of blind recursive evolution. But the introduction of this forebrain technology requires and asks critical reflection — dialectical redoubling, as Kierkegaard says — of the organism, which is to say to reflect upon what it is to be.

36:17 This is something that is characteristically a product and possibility of the terrain of forebrain technology. But this technology, especially in — right, which is why I’m saying modernity creates increasingly adversarial conditions to ontology. There is a proliferation of different devices, instruments, distractions, screens, all of which

36:48 promise the rewards of this deep hindbrain system of animal consciousness, and increasingly extract resources and instrumentalize via that mode of consciousness. Which is to say, modernity itself is an energetic well of extraction from the deepest, most primordial impulses of man and nature,

37:18 without desire to interrogate consequences. And this is precisely how we get into the predicament of modernity. And furthermore, how ontology increasingly disappears from the fabric of human culture as the years drag on, right? It becomes increasingly, as it always has been, an esoteric mode of investigation. Anything from Newton to the Eleusinian mysteries to

37:46 Socrates or Heraclitus — Spinoza — these have always been modes that existed on the fringe of human culture, precisely because of the immaturity itself of the species. Which, when we look at a couple thousand years, is nothing in terms of glacial evolution and revolution at the level of the genome or the biochemical equation of the human being. So this ontological

38:13 procedure or project becomes increasingly difficult, not only in the siloing of disciplines and the increasing depth of disciplines therein, but in the entire sphere of culture and civilization which scaffolds itself around the technological revolutions in channel two architecture — which is to say the cell phone, or electricity, or oil, or cars, or jet planes — which are made available

38:41 at the lowest kind of local levels of forebrain reflection. That the idea that one looks upon nature and extracts resources from nature with maybe a slightly clarified vision as to where those resources are and how they connect, right, which is to say chemical equations, which is the foundation of much of what is conceived of as math or science — all of which give us nothing. They give us pieces which can be utilized by ontology,

39:08 but ontology has been active since Heraclitus, which is to say since very rudimentary science and mathematics. This instrumentalization of nature, which is to say the abstraction of nature into numbers and equations, provides us very little but a rudimentary, adolescent understanding of being itself. What it provides us at best are the physical rules of law at work in the universe, which help clarify ontology,

39:39 but they do not change the fundamental principles of ontology, which have been active for thousands of years and have not been changed by scientific or mathematical revolution or evolution. These innovations always point back to ontological realizations which were made in times of

40:01 almost absolute dearth of what we would consider to be modern science or modern mathematics.

40:13 The condition of modernity is a dual condition. It’s a submission of the forebrain, fundamentally, to the biochemical hormonal responses to space-time, which is just the experience of being human in space and time. The instrument of the body, or the technology of the body, is processing information based on reliable inputs and outputs which have been established neurologically, biochemically, and hormonally over millions of years.

40:41 So there’s already a disadvantage of unconsciousness in such a situation as that — to even become aware of and awake to the fact that all of the different manufacturing principles of the self and the world, which are characteristic of modernity, civilization, and culture, and have been characteristic of the human experience time immemorial, are emerging fundamentally from that hardware template, which is utilizing energy, right? Consuming energy, excreting energy, reproducing,

41:10 persisting in space and time through these learned methods which have been substantiated, or adapted, or adopted as real embodied incarnate technologies. It’s the somatic form of the being itself, composite. So there’s that. But there’s also the terrain of complexity, which is the industrial, digital

41:38 technological world of the past, we could say, 250 years, maybe just 200 years, which has exponentially accelerated to the point at which the universe itself has effectively folded over on itself with the instantiation of the atom bomb and nuclear power. If you understand this, it’s the technology of Fermi.

42:06 It is an actual relationship to the most fundamental energetic source of existence itself, as we understand it phenomenologically: stars, or star systems.

42:22 And with the harnessing of energy at this level, there is this additive layer of world chaos, so to speak, which is the intense transformation and moving of mass amounts of energy, which is itself the political project ad verbatim at all times. But in modernity, that political project has an energetic payload unlike anything ever seen in human history, compared to maybe the feudal ages, or ancient Egypt, or Alexander, et cetera. It’s a very

42:51 rudimentary sticks-and-stones level of payloads in human history. So we go from guns to nuclear weapons, we go from swords, right? Even the technology of militaries across history, space, and time tells this tale very vividly, right? Because these technologies are always reflective of scientific epochs, or technological epochs themselves, in terms of

43:20 the possibilities and capacities of energetic forms and energetic understanding, which composes these paradigms at all levels. Anything from digital media to the Gutenberg Bible. This is what I mean by an enlightening of history without enlightenment of history. So all of this is to say, to kind of sum this up here: the existentialist literary form has always been primary

43:51 in human history, because it is an explication and exploration of the ontological ground. And it becomes ever more necessary in modernity, especially digital modernity, due to these accelerated forces which I’m describing, at the levels at which I’m describing them. Because the multivalent capacities, the veiling architectures, which obscure the actual critical existential reality of the condition of consciousness in space and time today,

44:20 as it stands — this iterative paradigm of the human being, this phase change, somewhere between the forebrain and something else, layered in and on top of and with which an unprecedented, exponentially accelerated industrial digital technological paradigm of the massive transformation of world energy, which has ripped the human body somatically out of its sun, moon, seasonal time,

44:48 into factory time, and then into the time of the digital screen, or blue light, or the accumulation of artificial intelligence to generate outputs based on the available history of symbolic language in the body of world human civilization, right? That this literature remains ever more primary, in the high-contrast way that I am describing. In fact, it’s become more important

45:17 precisely because of this. It is the attempt to return, in increasingly adversarial conditions,

45:25 to the ground of being itself. And it’s not to say that the time of Meister Eckhart was not adversarial. It was incredibly adversarial, especially in terms of institutional Christianity and the attempt to attack or excommunicate him — similarly with Spinoza and institutional Judaism. These communities and sects and tribes which

45:49 religiously adhered to a very firm belief structure which held their tribe or community intact — and you can understand why they were adversarial to ontological information, same thing with Kierkegaard. Because what that does is, it transforms the ability of the being, which is to say the entire culture, the community, or the tribe, or the civilization, or the species, to exist in space and time uncritically. Because the critical part doesn’t really matter at the level of the pure animal.

46:18 And this is what we’re talking about in terms of human evolution and forebrain potentialities. It is the space between pure animal and something else, due to, again, critical reflexivity, or dialectical redoubling.

46:32 The ability, the Jobian ability, to reflect upon existence itself is putting the being back into contact with the primordial consciousness itself, which is the stripping away of all of this veiling architecture, which becomes increasingly multivalent as the technological procession of channel two architectures marches on. Electricity, telephone, internet.

46:56 The masks become increasingly multiple, increasingly solidified, which all return back to the idea of the individual self as a being in space and time who has this job, this task, within the vast machinery of the architecture of civilization, which is compelling and impelling itself precisely due to and through the lack of critical reflection. This is why you have the idea of the monk, or the sage, or the saint, or the aghori,

47:24 all of whom really just represent, fundamentally, an inquest into the nature of being, which civilization itself understands, at least at an unconscious level, as being outside of the realm of its powers, purpose, or meaning. And that is the primary interrogation that needs to occur. That if humanity is to continue, or human being is to continue —

47:54 what is it? Is it a real question about the nature of what it is to be, which is the critical use of the forebrain to reflect upon experience of being? Or is it simply a continuation of the blind impulse and the device of persistence at the universal cosmological level, which is simply, as Nietzsche would say, a repetition of the same, or recurrence of the same? And that is the edge, or that is the dice we sit on,

48:24 in this epoch, ever more so even than 250 years ago, precisely because of the applied pressure. And by applied pressure, I mean the literal force at work,

48:37 right, which is the force of nuclear power, which is the force of the violence of these machines, which only continue to accelerate — accelerate without critical interrogation, due to the blind impulse behind them. You see this all the time in economics. This is the true impulse of capitalism: innovation at all costs, regardless of the consequences, because to stop innovating means to begin to critically interrogate. And that’s when these systems of impulse, power, self-

49:05 dominion begin to fall apart. This is the razor’s edge that humanity stands upon in modernity, ever more so than ever before.

49:17 And this is again why we have existentialist literature emerge in modernity, as a product of modernity, exclusive to modernity really, because the stakes have become ever higher, ever more fraught, and ever more complex.

49:43 And thus the necessity of conducting that exposition becomes ever more critical. In the face of — right? So when we look at someone like Percy Shelley as a figure in history, things literarily will be examined. But the reality is, what Shelley was doing was one of the earliest modern examples of a true inquisition into being, at all costs, against all forces of regulation, normalization, and standardization and instrumentalization,

50:14 which were really achieving their true foothold, I would say, first and foremost in British imperial modernity — British empire, industrially, technologically, bureaucratically.

50:30 And this is really the

50:35 examined life. So it’s that kind of ancient philosophical question of whether the unexamined life is worth living. And that’s not even being asked. It’s just being lived, out of pure necessity. And that’s the world that we experience. It’s the culture we consume. It’s the civilization in which we live. It’s critically empty. And that produces what becomes Heidegger’s world’s-midnight

51:05 proposition. The world is in a true midnight of darkness, and the darkness is the severance of being, or the loss of connection with being. And that’s why he turns to Hölderlin, the poet. So I think I’ve got it here. I hope you enjoyed this, and I’ll catch you later. See you.

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8. The Theater of the Private Mind — 9/17/26 Lecture

00:01 So now I kind of want to ease off the intensive thinking and dissect subjectivity. This will actually be pretty straightforward in light of the complexities we’ve already elucidated and worked through. Kind of some basic keywords here. So I was going back in my mind to the Menippean farce and Bakhtin.

00:29 And that’s a theme that kind of, I think, will remain for the foreseeable future. But in relation to our conversation on existentialist literature prior, there’s the aspect of the theater of the private mind, which is so essential to when we think about the annals of existentialist literature, from Kierkegaard to Dostoevsky to Céline to the confessions of Camus’ The Fall.

01:02 The mode, I think, was established quite well in the turn from Gogol to Dostoevsky, which is to say the public farce of the misguided or misvalued organism in the whole cultural-civilizational system of the denial of death, to put it in Becker’s words, into the

01:27 internal condition of the subject, or the mind of the subject, which effectively is a long kind of Hamletian soliloquy. Similarly in the vein of Rimbaud, A Season in Hell. Céline. Then, as I said, we get into the modern existentialists, Camus and Sartre.

01:52 And this is, I think, primarily — when we want to speak scientifically — the breakthrough of existentialist literary philosophy, which is to say the privileging of the experience of the biochemical organism, the nervous system organism, which is articulating the experience of reality that it is having. And this silo —

02:21 let us call that silo of the neurose and the biochemical container — is itself the aperture through which reality is conjured. So this is the claim that I’ll be making here. Of course, there is the ontos, right? The Heraclitean quote that T.S. Eliot uses: every man lives as though he had his own private —

02:47 but the logos is available to everyone. Right?

02:55 This is chiefly the realm of Heraclitus. Heraclitus is not interested in conjured realities, nor am I — except in the existentialist literary tradition, because what it does is it shows us and privileges the technology becoming aware of itself.

03:15 Timely conversation in the age of artificial intelligence. But the locus of subjectivity is itself the screen of eight billion realities conjured entirely by the biochemical nervous system apparatus of seeing, of being itself, right? The limits of culture are the limits of

03:42 God, as Pascal puts it. And obviously we know Pascal was very far beyond culture, into another realm entirely of kind of interdimensional communication of disciplines that we conceive of as being separate.

04:01 And of course they’re not. So this

04:09 conjuring is a collective act. It’s a species-level and even, I would say, a trans-species-level act of communication with nature, ecosystemic communication. And why is this? We perceive what we believe to be reality. We act in light of that perception, and thus change the conditions inhabited by the cosmological whole.

04:34 So we’ve said being is an ontology of persistence, right? Persistence against constraint at all scales, from star to cell. These conditions of persistence are that which is being altered by civilization, culture, economy, political economy, et cetera.

04:52 And why is this? Simply, the terrain is changed due to the perception of reality, which is then enforced as belief in action upon the field of being proper. And this is the turn, again, that I’ve already associated with the advent of the forebrain. And it remains there because it’s paradigmatic. It’s essential to understanding everything that comes afterwards. It’s the ground upon which everything that comes afterwards is.

05:21 So, much in the way that maybe a lion perceives an antelope to be food — it’s that the food itself, the word, is nonexistent. It is the continuation of the body of the animal in space and time through the necessity of the consumption of the antelope.

05:39 It’s not a linguistic turn that’s happening there, as opposed to when we talk about the emergence of the rational mind as a superstructure in the history of the human species.

05:55 We’re witnessing perception as a field not only become recursive in a personal sense — which is what we experience existentially in this loop, in everything from Job to Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, right? This historical period of time that emerges, this breach, which is itself the breach of culture and civilization, which creates a second field, which I’ve already called channel two, of perception as debated and enforced

06:27 by culture, through culture. So when people speak about maybe something like a culture war, or the culture wars — however contrived, kind of superficial, such a term is — what they’re describing is the field of perception, which for the vast majority of the human species is already incredibly limited, superficial, and surfeit of cosmological identity, which is to say perception of the ground of being.

06:56 This field is almost always already almost entirely dedicated to the fulfillment of the animal impulse, which is survive, reproduce, justify existence, right? All of these being very simple and essential one-to-one persistence mechanisms. The forebrain is being conjured and harnessed and used as a technological apparatus, much like the oil drill, for one essential purpose: to further the conditions of the former,

07:27 to extend the lifespan, if you will. That this field of perception then becomes a juror in this theater of human history, which is adjudicating

07:43 epochs of energy, right? It’s transmitting energy to different depots, to different places, to different locales, and that energy is being utilized there for XYZ purposes. This is everything from genocide, to distribution of oil barrels, to the religious precepts which govern reproduction in certain tribes and sects and nations.

08:11 This is the power of scripture, right? And the power of ideology as a force which controls and mediates disciplines, beings, in a continual process of

08:31 attempting — already, perceived reality is already mediated by perception, which is to say it is distorted, instrumentalized, and manipulated for the purposes of the individual being. But then furthermore there’s the additive channel two layer of ideological, political, religious control, which then is the narrativization

08:52 of this subjectivity in a contemporary sense, which Hegel would call the zeitgeist, or the spirit of the age, which is nothing more really than the manufactured conduit of control, which is then layered upon, like chains, the civilized body or the subject. So when we talk about subjectivity, there’s subjection, in the sense that Hartman and Sharpe talk about it

09:23 in cultural theory: the theater of subjection itself being a disciplinary theater of control via ideological apparatuses, regarding everything from race to class to sexuality, etc. And so when we’re looking at this theater of the private mind, to return it to the primacy of existential literature,

09:48 we’re looking at, again — I discussed this in the prior lecture — the Inannic, as in this Sumerian goddess stripping away, through the various different layers or stages of hell, the worldly, which there in that script just means culture, civilization, the baggage of these technological prosthetics which really have nothing to do with being, encountering being, to encounter being in the depths of hell to retrieve her sister.

10:17 So this is a myth which has been in so many ways replicated across cultures — Orpheus, or the hero twins, right? Because it represents a fundamental primary human experience of katabasis, which is the descent into the substrate.

10:39 And this is the archetypal foundation of existentialist literature.

10:51 This is what interests me primarily: the theater of the private mind, and how that creates the theater of the public mind, which is to say social, civilizational, cultural discourse.

11:04 And I wish it was more of a mystery to me than it is. It’s still fascinating to some extent, but the reality of the situation is that this is a theater conjured by a public mass whose capabilities and measure of critical thought in relation to ontology of being — which is to say recognition of the self in a cosmological or universal sense — is so limited, so, um,

11:36 not to say contrived, but trite.

12:06 [pause]

12:15 So this sphere of representation of truth. Truth is such a loaded term in the modern world, as it is in the religious world and the pre-modern world, whatever world

12:30 you live in. But truth is just simply the ontological core of existence, the fundamental character of being, which is really the unity of science, myth, religion, history, time, into really a functional mechanism or a functional practice of behaviors, regardless of how much technology revolutionizes. So whether it’s the theater of artificial intelligence, or the computer, or the camera, or the theater of humanity, or the cell, or the star:

12:57 what is behind the mask of phenomenological manifestation? What is the action being performed — the action that therein helps us discern and deduce the character? So this

13:12 theater of privacy gives us an understanding of not only human history but cosmological history. This is critical. Because

13:25 the privileging of the private mind, which is to say the articulation of existential experience, and the highest degrees of literacy performing this act — I would also include Ellison here — the highest degrees of literacy performing this act: when we look at maybe Dostoevsky or Rimbaud, we’re looking at the universe articulating itself in the most base and fundamental way, in the process of self-realization.

13:56 Self-realization is kind of a contrived term in most spiritual historical circles, regarding something that has a primacy of the self: that I’m realizing myself, and thus I am enlightened, or XYZ. But all this is, is realization of the ontological ground of being. And this is a reality. This is understood in Vedantic terms, which is to say experiential terms, in a way that —

14:26 And this is what’s interesting about the history of Western philosophy and the history of the Western world: is that the self needs to be created in order to be destroyed. And this is kind of a very esoteric idea or conception of history, but this is how I see modern Western civilization naturally unfolding. The self has to rise for it to fall.

14:47 And in the fall, or the defeat, or the destruction of the conception of the self, or the subject, or the hero — which is the backbone of Western civilization, which is to say individualism, the individual, and all of the economic precepts and codes that come with it — the fall of this false ontology

15:06 gives us something that is not present in the East, which is to say the death of the self.

15:14 This code of the self has become enforced through Western colonial imperialism globally, in terms of name, identity. You can even look at the ideological progression of Christianity in this concept of the incarnate individual, which is to say Jesus Christ. And you see this forced historical teleology present itself. It’s an idea born deeply in the subconscious of Western civilization, which

15:44 is the switch itself which enables the genocide that it conducts, the favor that it attempts to produce, politically, economically, and otherwise, and destroys much of the world, much of the ecosystem that actually the world itself depends on in a global sense.

16:06 You’re watching this suicide act play out on stage, this tragedy. But here again, what I would argue is, it’s — like all things — a necessary cosmological process of self-realization through the attempt at construction of an edifice, or an artifice, right? So when we look at creation, or art, as universal cosmic forces,

16:35 I gesture back to Heraclitus. I mean the artifice of the universe: the Aeon is a child at play with colored balls. What he’s saying there is, the eternal is just at an act of play, an experimentation. And that is what my persistence ontology also articulates in a slightly different way: that the universe itself is blindly, unconsciously experimenting with possibilities, potential alternatives, structures, superstructures, prosthetics,

17:05 arms, legs, forebrains, hindbrains, spines, in the attempt to create sustainable conditions to exist in form. This is being and non-being, formal and formless, or informal. So: the creation of a structure which can persist in time, and the increasing sophistication of these structures. These are beings,

17:34 emergences based in time, which interact with the existent cosmological and geological conditions, even civilizational or cultural conditions, wherein they rise, or they’re thrown into being, as Heidegger would say, and then they return to this formlessness, or their energy is then redistributed into a variety of other projects. And so when we’re looking at this

18:03 privileging of subjectivity which we are granted in existentialist literature, it takes us to a place that — I guess this is just my opinion — is further

18:16 than I get from Hindu mysticism, or Taoist

18:30 hermetics, right?

18:39 And the primary reason for that is because of the attempt at self as construct, which is endemic to Western civilization. And you notice, right, these authors that I’ve listed are individuals with literary projects.

18:57 This is kind of the paradox of the great literary project. It’s a castle made of sand. It’s the institution of a story that is not real, can never be real, attempts to maintain some grasp or foothold on history — whether through the act of telling a historical story, perhaps like Homer, or another form of somewhat historical fiction, right? So it depicts circumstances, maybe in the way of Tolstoy or Chekhov,

19:27 but simultaneously to remark upon time. This is essential to literature, in my opinion. It’s that literature itself is a symbolic remark upon time, in the same way that cave paintings are.

19:45 This fundamentally differentiates literature from music. Music cannot remark upon time. It’s not scribing, it’s articulating — unless we want to discuss the recording of a record, which of course then is going to be different. So:

20:03 inscribing upon wax, which I think is very fitting in terms of what we’re talking about. There’s a great ancient Hindu sage who discusses the world as wax forms, and that’s really a lot of what we’re getting behind here. But the experience of the technology of being is what I return to. And this is why, again, with Job, or with Dostoevsky, or with Rimbaud,

20:33 we are talking about the human task that resides beneath everything: the artifice and survival mechanisms and control of political systems, social systems, cultural beliefs. These things are understood, I think, maybe most clearly in Rimbaud. I think Notes from Underground may be a very close second.

21:01 Understood very clearly as things that must be shed, or left behind, or surpassed, gone beyond. And this is in large part the philosophical project of modernity: the stripping away of this excrement, these dead stones which are piled up on top of the body, which is the ruin of history. And therein, the mass amounts of meaninglessness which have been thrown in upon the body and serve only as a distraction and a waste

21:31 of time. To throw off these garments, in the Inannic way, and to step into that encounter with the transpersonal self, or the self of being.

21:45 And this excavational project, this archaeological project, is again directly aligned with the tradition of katabasis. But it’s a historical katabasis. It is not mythological. And so in many ways this pre-modern katabasis tradition, world tradition, anticipates modernity. And this is critical, because what we’re talking about

22:08 is an unconscious cosmological subject attempting to create persistence models, or persistence mechanisms, in time. So much of the world is in many ways foreshadowing. It’s foreshadowing of technologies that will emerge and must emerge due to the necessity of the underlying condition, which is persistence against constraint. And thus

22:34 the iterations which must, can, and do occur throughout cosmological history, to increasingly articulate more and more sophisticated forms — which is to say forms of higher intelligence, higher sentience ability, cognitive function in space and time, to be able to navigate that which it is. Which is also where we get this concept of spiritual realization, or self-realization. To be self-realized in an ontological sense

23:04 is to be identified with this cosmic self, for lack of a better word, this cosmic force of persistence which manifests the technology through which the ignorant or deluded subject then goes about proclaiming he is a name and a number. And this is where we get Gogol’s The Nose. Because Gogol intuits this and understands this, and perhaps in his

23:31 deep mind articulates it even in a better way than the visionary seership of someone like Rimbaud, or the underground man of Dostoevsky. So this is an interesting kind of literary parallel that could be gotten into, but this is not primarily a literary conversation — although what we’re discussing here, philosophical existential literature, is incredibly important to what we are talking about.

24:00 Beneath this field, right, already — and this is where I’ve said humanity is at such a disadvantage in modernity. But this is not necessarily new, as you can understand in the feudal ages, or ages of empires. The same principles are at work, with significantly less technological sophistication, which is to say control of and domestication of space and time, condensation of space and time, right?

24:27 Locales, into regionalities, into nationalities, and into globalities, right. Of control of information, energy, product, consumption — all of these things are the masks of status and power, the movement of energy. So this has always been

24:49 an issue, right? Because there’s two conditions to navigate. One is the condition of inward looking, or inward sight, which we would just call the existential project of beings in relation to being, which is, again, the primacy of ontology, the eternal task at hand: beings in relation to being, which has been a project of millions of years, even billions of years, if you want to talk about

25:15 the historical reality of sentience emerging from early stellar systems. This has been a progressive unfolding of possibility.

25:29 So.

25:32 That is the real question. And the question is, how do we get to that question? And the problem is the sediment of history, technology, culture, civilization, all of which are saying essentially nothing, doing nothing other than manipulating survivability — which is to say, it’s stirring muddy water in a swamp.

25:58 There’s no other way to put it. It’s a manipulation of the existing static, stagnant circumstances to create the Nietzschean eternal recurrence, which is to say the return of the same over and over again, day after day: the brutal, brute, blind attempt to persist. And I understand the paradox in what I’m saying, in that

26:22 I’m arguing and articulating that persistence itself is the character of the universe. So why would the character of the universe not continue to express itself? What I’m suggesting is that we observe it, and find where we identify with it in the greater, larger continuum of being. We expand our self-conception beyond the narrow, survival-oriented, death-driven locus of the pure

26:46 body organism, and come into a greater communion with something that allows us deeper connection to existence itself. And that is a better use of technology. Maybe not. I guess that’s just an interpretation, and maybe just a moral debate. But everyone gets to decide how to use technology, right? In existence itself, in terms of beings,

27:10 organisms are forms in space and time with specific capacities. And when we talk about perception, we’re talking about the unification of those capacities into the way of being in time.

27:26 And this is why the battle for the theater of the private mind — which is already compromised at a species level, I would say just primarily genetically; it’s a deeply unsophisticated adolescent form, which is rarely, if ever, capable of finding some sort of transcendent communion with being on an ontological level beyond pure survival — this already compromised form

27:58 is then subjected to the onslaught of digital technological modernity, which is really a caste system of surveillance and manipulation of energy.

28:11 So you have this already compromised subject, which is born in many ways out of wedlock with being. And then furthermore you have this additive force which is brutalizing everything from the education systems to the political mechanisms, the political parties, the way that they work in space and time with resources, energetic resources, the forces at work in the world, which are established

28:39 dominion and domain of these political powers — these kings, or emperors, or politicians, or those who are attempting to obtain power in the world for purposes of instantiating better terms of this already delusional body of persistence, which is to say the local organism. Right? So the disadvantage is exponentially doubling

29:08 in modernity, as opposed to maybe the king sends his warriors with spears for several days of a march over the desert, and you’re fighting with sticks and stones and rocks. This is a question of time, space, and energy, as it always is, in terms of conducting really the only project of existence: the encounter with being itself.

29:37 We seek this everywhere, but find it nowhere. This is the Sphinxian mystery of existence. Can you seek being when being is everywhere? It’s a question of how we are perceiving. And Blake understood this. Blake was also called a madman, right? But he leaves maybe the only mark

30:04 ever worth making in the British Empire — him and Shelley, maybe a couple others.

30:12 The rest of it was just brute persistence, and that’s written down as history. But in reality, all it is is repetition. Nothing happened. Resources were moved around with somewhat increasing efficacy, proficiency, capability,

30:31 somewhat, with all the ineptitude that comes with bureaucracy. Gogol understood this quite well. So much of the comedy, or the farce, that emerges from Russia, from Gogol to modernity, is a farce of bureaucratic failure. We can look at Kafka as well as a great example of this. Because what’s being seen here in Gogol and Kafka, critical to ontology, is the

30:59 failures of these systems, institutions, governments, civilizations, doing the one thing they even care about doing, or attempting to do, which is ultimately meaningless anyway. And this produces the profound sense of existential ennui that we experience in reading Kafka or Gogol: the sense of brutal,

31:23 empty farce being enacted upon a population of unsuspecting or unknowing people, as in Joseph K. in Kafka’s The Trial. So this

31:53 force at work is at extreme detriment to the possibilities of the human condition. Because when we look at the possibilities of the human condition, it’s a short list. It’s survive, reproduce, persist — and come into encounter with that which it is at the deepest level, which is to say the character of being itself, in a universal or supra-global sense. The rest is theater.

32:24 And the theater is what is made sufficient

32:31 by history, evacuated of the sacred.

32:37 The theater is made sufficient to justify the continued survival of something, or many somethings, many beings, who have no idea what they are — and thus, in the surfeit of meaning, attempt to create a surplus of sensation. And this is how we get our consumerist utopia

33:02 of modernity. How we get the wigs and the uniforms and the balls of the political aristocracies of the past 300, 400, etc. years, and the mass poverty on the streets, the profound illnesses and disease that are spread in that process,

33:29 the factories, the mines. Understand this as the theater of persistence, however brutal it is, right? This is Artaud’s question of the theater of cruelty, and the reinstantiation of the sacred by the creation of a theater which would return humanity to a condition — I’m not saying he specifically referenced it, but the condition of the Eleusinian mysteries, or a condition of

33:58 world native communion, cosmologically, with being through storytelling, through ritual, through shamanic or medicine performance, dance, or expression through theaters of masks,

34:14 psychedelic substances, etc. Right? This was and is long understood by humanity, abandoned in modernity through the beginnings of this paradigm shift which occurs towards the self. And Terence McKenna expresses this as a

34:36 loss of regular psychedelic ritual, which I think is an interesting concept, because many of these, if not all of these, substances naturally dissolve the experience of the manufactured cultural self, or civilizational self, and reveal a deeper transpersonal experience of being in the process of their ingestion.

35:02 This is why in many cultures they’re used shamanically. They’re used as tools to access this transpersonal realm,

35:11 because it changes the way that the organ system and the nervous system are experiencing reality. And so this is why Blake describes it as: man sees through narrow chinks in his cave; if he saw things as they really were, he would see them as being infinite. Simply what he’s saying there is,

35:39 the veil is much less a veil of modernity — although that veil is pernicious, accelerating, and highly distracting. It’s a carnival of excess and grotesqueries, in the Menippean sense. It’s a Rabelaisian play of the lowest forms of degradation and terror and ontological poverty,

36:02 which is not necessarily new, but it’s worth noting, right? Because it is distracting. It’s a waste of time, and furthermore a waste of energy, which can be used to pay close attention to being itself and to learn that which one is. So it’s not necessarily primarily that, being a theater — and I think that’s what catches up most of modern philosophy, even modern science — is the

36:28 injection of this theater of the world metropolis and all of its distractions, conveniences, and cultural beliefs, which become an endless cycle of just nothingness, which is just noise. But at a deeper level, it’s the issue of the programming of the human being, right? The technology of the being itself, which is perceiving. And again, the limits of perception, or the limits of culture, the limits of God, as Pascal says in his notebooks —

36:59 that limitation is not so much a limit of choice, but a limit of hardware capacity. That there is a ceiling, even with the advent of this forebrain epoch, that there needs to be a necessarily sophisticated nervous system experience, which is to say sensorial

37:27 experience of the presence of being of the organism itself. We’re talking about a very high-falutin form of presence. And as we can see historically, just in the nature of cultural products, all of which leave their mark and scrawl upon the wall of history and time, there’s very, very little of that substance available to humanity. And it is what

37:55 we starve for and starve of, because that substance itself is what avails us increasingly of proximity to being. This is why Heidegger looks to Hölderlin, the poet and the philosopher, perhaps one of the greatest minds of his time, even as he was surrounded by the greatest minds of German idealism — Schelling and the rest of them, Hegel.

38:25 Um, because he looks to Hölderlin. He doesn’t look to, um, the politician,

38:38 or — not in a degrading way — every other person. This exclusivity of proximity to being was previously, again, historically understood as the shamanic or the medicine vocation, in periods of time without this disciplinary siloing of, we could even say, science or medicine or philosophy or poetry.

39:10 Right? This function was performed as a totally unified cosmological experience of being. It was not fragmented into glass shards of symbolic registers, all of which really amount to nothing: names and numbers.

39:27 This was a vocation, a proximity to being, which culturally and civilizationally, you understand — it’s not to say that they were more sophisticated technologically, these civilizations or tribes that I’m speaking about, and they’re numerous in the pre-modern sense. It’s that they were more aware of the importance of connection to being, and they based in large part their behaviors, their systems, their cultures,

39:57 their lives around fostering, interlocuting, re-interlocuting, and establishing a foundational baseline of the experience of proximity to being as essential to life, to existence. You could say this is an existentially informed culture, or ontologically informed culture. And the

40:25 loss of that is in many ways, right — and this is where I will connect to the theater of the private mind and the creation of the modern subject.

40:41 The loss of that is the privileging of the individual. Because what the shamanic or the medicine person does, or this person who undergoes katabasis — we could say the Orphic figure of history — is dissolve these presumed biochemical, neurological boundaries of the, we could say, technologically manufactured self of nature, which is to say just

41:10 the technology of beings as they exist in this current iterative form, and all of the kind of rote and fundamental experiences of being human that we have, which are directing us to perform certain actions at certain points of time, depending on biochemical hormonal signals and the limits of the sophistication of our sensory bodies, right? As well as our nervous systems and the cognitive function

41:39 at speed and at depth at which we work in the world — to continually, right, ritually reintroduce the sacred, the transpersonal sacred, which itself was and is, in the strictest ancient sense, psychedelic experience: psyche-revealing, the experience of revealing the ground beneath the most pernicious and assumed everyday

42:08 human behaviors, identities, constructs. And this ritual revelation, over and over again, is acculturating the tribe or the community toward a deeper experience of the transpersonal being, in which the relationship to world becomes increasingly permeable and

42:28 fundamentally ethically informed, because the self is enlarged in a cosmological sense. The self is now perceived as being everywhere and in all things — which I’m saying, in a modern sense, is just persistence against constraint in a scientifically informed way across scales. So this theater of the private mind is being broken down in existential literary philosophy by figures such as Rimbaud or Dostoevsky,

42:57 by way of the undergoing of this katabasis. These figures that we experience as literary historical figures are figures who are unmoored —

43:06 as Dostoevsky would be in the Russian, or Rimbaud would be in the French — unmoored from this greater shamanic or medicine tradition of being the one who naturally traverses these realms and undergoes katabases: the Orphic function of any given region or locale or community. It’s really a nervous system configuration

43:33 to undergo

43:37 that experience of communion with being, and the fracture of modernity in the face of that undergoing, and the lack of really

43:49 true ontological relationship which is being established and affirmed continually.

43:57 That’s the ground which is lost there. So they are dissembling, by way of the lack of tradition in large part, this privileging of the subject. And this is where the hubris of modern humanity comes into play: that each person’s subjectivity is treated as world, right? It’s treated as real. And this is where you see in this,

44:27 all of this dialogue in the contemporary about the loss of truth. This is a necessary outcropping from the historical process which has been going on for the past 200, 300 plus years — even going back to the Spanish conquering of the Aztecs in the 1500s. This is systematic dismantling of the sacred, and replacing the sacred with an instrumentalized, localized, death-fearing organism

44:57 which is based entirely in survival, persistence, right? It does not have relationship to being. And this survival persistence, as an experiential reality, is being instrumentalized by this increasingly scaffolded prosthetic infrastructure, which is extracting, manipulating, controlling, moving resources, and enforcing

45:23 a political reality which is kind of the hell of nothingness, which is experienced by the modern existentialists of Sartre and Camus as simply unbearable and meaningless — because it is. It has no relationship to being. It’s entirely evacuated of the sacred, which is of course what Heidegger is realizing with horror in his world’s midnight, in

45:52 Nazi Germany and the onset of World War II. And we’re given — really, it’s a great privilege to be able to read A Season in Hell, or to read Notes from Underground — because what that is, is the privilege of experiencing

46:15 someone, or something in an organismic sense, incredibly sophisticated: technological, infrastructural, neurological relationship to being, which is inborn to the character of the individual who is inscribing their experience. You’re experiencing in many ways the, uh,

46:36 the vanguard of human possibility, so to speak, which is direct relationship to being, being directly inscribed as in, you could say, a soliloquy.

46:50 And the experience of that individual undergoing that process is transpersonal, trans-historical, across all space and time, all cultures, all traditions,

47:05 undergoing this process within the conditions of technological modernity, which produces the high strangeness of having to navigate the exponentialized theatrical carnival of falsities in a way that hitherto has no precedent. It makes the ancient Greeks or the ancient Romans look like a bunch of children playing with sticks,

47:32 because of the acceleration of infrastructure, instrumental infrastructure such as the factory, going into the internet, going into artificial intelligence, right? These are symbolic orders, right? Symbolic mechanisms which function in the world and transform energetic conditions at speed, ever faster, ever more singularized in a space-time sense, which produces

48:02 exponential alienation, which is to say total distraction from the real project of being human, by way of the universalization of this political economy of pure survival, pure persistence at the lowest, most base form, being conducted everywhere at all times. Being educated into the political subject, who studies

48:31 these systems of extraction, manipulation, consumption, production — does not study, does not contemplate ontology. This is the true great crime of all political history. It’s just a waste of time, and it’s destroying everyone’s lives, really, because there is no relationship to being. That’s the last thing that a political infrastructure can handle.

49:00 We understand that from Socrates to 2026. Yes, we already talked about perception as a field debated and enforced by culture.

49:17 And that’s the great shame, right? Cultural influence and cultural manipulation is the instrument of empire. It’s the instrument of political economy. It’s the instrument of all control. It’s all meaningless. There’s nothing in it that’s relevant. The best thing we have, the best thing we can do, is to create circumstances for the direct relationship to being, and commune with

49:46 experiences of direct relationship to being, whether that’s in the historical record or otherwise. And the rarity of that in the historical records should suggest to you that there is very little that is meaningful to consume or participate in in relationship to human culture and human civilization at large. And that is the poverty

50:10 of modernity, the poverty of human history, the poverty of humanity: that when we actually look for the real wealth, there is none. Money is everywhere. Culture is everywhere. Civilization is everywhere. What has it produced? Nothing.

50:27 Infrastructure to help you get faster, less digestible food. Infrastructure to help you absorb and ingest meaningless, regurgitated, highly politicized rhetoric.

50:46 Infrastructure to instantiate coercive control over resources across vast swaths of space. The empire of nothing, so to speak, right? So, of course, each of us has a choice of what to give primacy to in the world, right? What to value.

51:10 What I’m suggesting is, what little value there is lies always, as it has been — and humanity has always known this — within the experiences and visions of those who have truly undergone the katabasis and inscribed it thusly, for us to hear and understand and witness their experience of encountering the self in a cosmological being sense, way, and word.

51:38 This is just a mark of authenticity. It’s the mark of experience, right? It’s the scar of hell that each of these participants in the great

51:47 cosmic theater wears, right? This cosmic theater has very little to do with mankind. Mankind will just brutally persist, as do all organisms and as does all life, with brief moments of recognition, which I would call excellence, which I would call existential excellence. We call this the great work, so to speak, if you want to put it in alchemical terms. Carl Jung understood this quite well as well.

52:16 And it is what is beyond the menippea, right? So when I started this with the theater of the private mind, the biochemical container, the influence of culture, the work of history — suggesting that all of these things are essentially nothing. They’re just scaffolding for maybe increasingly sophisticated ontological projects.

52:38 There’s a difference in doing ontology in 2026 than doing ontology with Heraclitus at the Temple of Artemis. There’s more information available. There’s more understanding of nature available in terms of physical processes, right? In a scientifically informed way, which thus increases the resolution of our ontological project, which is communion with being. It’s like the transition from cave art to photography, or

53:06 IMAX film, for instance, right? With increasing acuity, the ontologist with more depth and diversity of information in terms of physical processes. This is really just primarily science, but also philosophy of history, science of history, as in Marx or Hegel. We pull together the vision of the character of being across scales through predictable, superstructural behavior and action in space and time.

53:34 So this, as I was saying, this is the great menippea of human history, which is just the carnival and the theater of the private mind in action, producing the culture and the civilization, which themselves are just reflections of the emptiness and vacuity of civilizations, which are increasingly emptied of the sacred and replaced with commodity markets.

53:57 So when you see gambling or prostitution, these kind of — as they were historically articulated as, like, Sodoms and Gomorrahs and Babylons, et cetera — these are not, it’s not even necessarily positive or negative. It’s just the primary call sign of the depth of evacuation of ontological primacy in any given civilization, culture, society, tribe, et cetera. With

54:26 the depth of evacuation of the sacred, correspondingly there is a fulfillment of the debased. I’m not even going to call it, uh, desacr— well, it’s desacralized. I’m not going to call it degraded, because it’s not even filthy. It’s just empty. And this is the tragedy and calamity of modernity: that these empty cultural forms are taken as

54:56 high importance, whether that’s extreme material wealth, whether that’s extreme celebrity, whether that’s extreme success at gambling or marketing oneself on the internet. These are all terrible things. They’re very, very, very bad, because they’re a waste of time and energy. They’re absolute distraction, pure distraction. You wasted your whole life. Dostoevsky said: you destroyed yourself for nothing.

55:26 But you did it because this was all the culture could give you. This was all the culture had available to give you. You were born into the most extreme desacralized, degraded cultural, ontological poverty. And then you were trained by those around you, with no elders, right, with no real sacral community, which is to say no real

55:54 practitioners of the descent, no real katabatic practitioners who survived that descent — because of course the culture was already bankrupt. They never made it far enough. They just died, because there was no infrastructure or resources to support them. You were born into this

56:11 deeply desacralized, impoverished culture. You were trained into it. So you took the name, the identity, the role, the Gogolian overcoat, the Gogolian nose. You walked out into the Menippean farce of human history. You performed your dutiful act for civilization. And then you died as a social role in a meaningless construct in a desacralized, emptied universe, totally evacuated. And that was what you did. That was your life.

56:41 That’s existential horror.

56:44 And that’s modernity, just as it was in the feudal age, the medieval age, the time of the French cardinals.

56:57 Et cetera. Because even — I love the Dumas book, The Count of Monte Cristo, because it does in many ways kind of touch on the theater of the masks. But in reality, what is it? It’s a story of political, social revenge. And that’s very much what history is. Just understand this: it’s a theater of lower forms

57:24 and manifestations. Again, the Rabelaisian carnival, which of course is essential to the concept of Menippean farce. And this is the tragedy. There is really no other tragedy to me, other than the tragedy at the global level of the desacralized

57:45 universe, right, which is due entirely to abandoning — not that it ever really was adopted, but in extremely pre-modern tribes and societies, of which there are many; not that it ever really was adopted in modernity, or the onset of modernity — the loss, just total loss, of this essential ontologist function,

58:12 which itself was the primary regulator

58:17 and the foundational cultural vision in and through which local regional peoples existed. The cosmology was the vision of reality.

58:33 It wasn’t the individual person who maybe was vaguely associated to one or another dying religious construct, had no other education, totally ontologically impoverished, except for maybe an education in law — or whatever, human law — and then goes and performs this task and attempts, as best as they can,

58:57 to discern how to live and survive in this ontologically evacuated world.

59:06 That’s everyone. That’s this entire world.

59:13 That’s the level of loss that we’re talking about. And that’s the level of, effectively, mass sacrifice that we’re witnessing:

59:22 mass sacrifice of a species which knows absolutely nothing about itself, is totally invested in the cultural, civilizational farce of humanity, at the loss of ontological ground which was instituted by ancient practitioners.

59:41 That faculty, that function, has never left humanity. It always has been incredibly sparse, those who perform it, obviously performing it at different levels of acuity and ability. But nonetheless it remains, because it is somatic relationship to being. It is proximity to the transpersonal, permeable. This is also why so much of the mental health

1:00:09 dialogues that occur in modernity are so debased: because they occur entirely outside of remembrance of this function, permeability of the self.

1:00:26 That is effectively what I have. And it leaves us much where we are left with Gogol: the vision of Gogol and the nose. And the great crime, the existential crime, the ontological crime of modernity is the total debasement of our civilizations and cultures around the world,

1:00:52 replaced with utterly desacralized consumerist emptiness. I don’t even know if you can call it an ideology. Just pure rote survival, sped up to hyperspace with digital technological modernity, filled with information, all of it utterly meaningless.

1:01:17 And you are given several different opportunities to navigate that, none of which come from a sacralized ontological foundation or base. Your culture is politicians, celebrities, self-degradation in the name of acquiring capital — whether social, political, economic — and the assumption of a social role,

1:01:45 everything from your name to your number to the thing that you do as a cog in the gear of this ceaselessly churning, emptily burning civilizational machine, which produces nothing other than the same excess that makes just pure bare rote life perhaps bearably easier, in some minimal extent or constraint or way.

1:02:14 It simultaneously deprives the human being of the single most important, foundational, essential resource: relationship, existentially, to being. To live in that evacuated everyday, as Mayakovsky calls it. And the failure

1:02:35 of that, and the forgetting that comes with that, of the ontological rituals of civilizations and epochs prior, which sought to increase the presence of being in everyday life — because that is the highest form of sophistication available to human beings. Otherwise it’s just survive, eat, reproduce, die, as, uh, I don’t know — whatever you are, when you don’t know what you are,

1:03:05 who you are, or what you’re doing, or why you’re here. You just do it because someone’s telling you.

1:03:12 And that in large part is a failure of education. That’s also a failure of priorities, a failure of values, a failure of systems, a failure of visions of the way of being, all of which have conveniently found themselves diverted onto this path of absolutely economized, instrumentalized modernity.

1:03:38 So what is the true wealth?

1:03:45 Anything else, to me, is just unbearably sad and pathetic.

1:03:51 And I don’t even know if it’s a choice, right? It’s just seemingly the best alternative. And this has to do entirely with how we prioritize sacral relationship to being as a species. It’s not to say that everyone is born with specific capacities and proximity of access, which is to say sensitivity of presence in a transpersonal way — neurologically, synaptically, and otherwise.

1:04:19 But it is to say that that infrastructure can be established, has been established historically, and can be established even in an even more exponentially influential and positive way in modernity, especially with the technological resources available.

1:04:38 And we see the consequences of this every day, and they just keep happening, because it’s the same thing over and over again. It’s the same emptiness, the same obliviousness, the same evacuated, debased relationship to being, which is just instrumentalization. So the same things happen, and they’ll continue to happen, as I guess they say, until morale improves. So thanks for watching. I’ll catch you later.

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9. Biochemical Entrainment and the Deep Unconscious Rhythm of Goethe’s Nature -- 9/17/26 Lecture

00:03 So when we’re talking about programming, we’re talking about nature. I’ve already gone all the way into this in terms of technology: channel one and channel two, genomic architecture, biochemical architectures,

00:20 synaptic nervous system architectures, into the architecture of civilization, language, literature, carving into stone, mythology, etc. These are all architectural productions, creative productions of nature experimenting with persistence — right, persistence against constraint, which are the rules and regulations of the natural physical world, the physical processes of being in time. Gravity,

00:50 entropy, entropic systems, et cetera. So what we witness when we’re looking at nature — and I think it took Goethe a little while to understand this. One of my favorite quotes from him, I think it’s from one of his notebooks: nature, she is all right, she is not necessarily at fault, but she is the

01:16 movement of all things. And he talks about this with the Urpflanze, the kind of primordial archetypal flower. He’s trying to grasp, through phenomenology, the character of nature. So Goethe is also an ontologist, working within the realm of the German idealistic period. So when we’re looking at nature, nature is always in reflection unto and towards itself, in terms of beings in relationship to being, right? Again,

01:45 the metastructure in relation to the cognitive architectures it builds as an attempt to persist in time blindly.

01:54 Everything from the forebrain, to the squirrel or the chipmunk with the acorn, to the tree, to the star, to the cell, to the galaxy. So what is in nature is always already in reaction to the world, right? This is the architecture of self in relationship to world. It is a dialogue of the pseudo-closed organism, which experiences itself as an architectural form, in the sense that it exists as a bounded structure in an ecosystem of, uh,

02:22 somewhat equivalent other bounded structures, which are in various degrees of sentient relationship to this reality. Again, dialectical redoubling: the forebrain experiencing themselves as entropic structures in space and time. This is across species, in various different dimensions of cognition. So.

02:44 Nature is always already in reaction to itself. It’s an endless chain of reactions, even just perceptually, right — of course, in terms of biking down a crowded street — or architecturally, in terms of a biochemical or hormonal reaction to incurring or occurring situations.

03:10 This is a simulated response via a technological system: inputs and outputs. This is being mediated by a technological structure, however organic, cellular, or organismic it may seem. It’s still technological architecture. It’s genomic architecture, nervous system architecture, organ system architecture.

03:33 So this response to stimuli — you can understand this quite literally in terms of entrainment, scientifically: nervous system entrainment, behavioral entrainment. You are observing circumstances through the aperture of millions of years of sedimentary process of evolution, which is scaling genomically the reproductive return of the organism with

04:01 various different paradigmatic changes in the scale of disclosure available to said organism. Again, forebrain, opposable thumbs. Different capacity for interacting with the terrain, whether in a purely material physical sense or in a metaphysical, cognitive, recursive sense. At any given time, a product of evolution is in discourse with its environment. Again, beings are in discourse with being at any given moment in time.

04:31 And this is the simulated superstructure of reality, that we experience these organisms in various different stages or phases of cognition in relationship to the ontological persistence, the operator itself of existence in process — everything always already in utero and on the precipice of another further transformation, right? This is what species architectures do.

05:00 They reproduce within genetic proliferations, which is genealogical lineages, genomic transmissions across various different diasporadic experiences of the species. And they come together to form new architectures, attempting to scale genomic traits through recombination to produce organisms which are furthermore capable — ideally, hopefully, right — through the process of recombinative experimentation.

05:29 The Aeon is a child at play with colored balls: through recombinative experimentation, using genomic information technology to come into contact with the character of being itself, persistence against constraint. This dialogue is always already occurring, right? And it is understood explicitly in the hindbrain architecture, right? Survive, reproduce — this is already built into the programmatic structure of the organism.

05:58 But in a forebrain sense, it is not sufficiently understood rationally as a real system that is occurring, and here is how it is operative, simultaneously inside and outside, as in the self-world dialogue, which is ultimately subsumed in the larger ontological character of being itself. Self and world are dissolved. This is the traditional mystical understanding, but here I’m presenting it to you ontologically, just as a pure process,

06:28 stripped bare of all of the different accoutrements and interpretations therein. So this nature in reaction to world is the nodal transformation of energy. So you experience discrete energetic units, or at least the appearance of discrete energetic units, right? This is the pseudo-closed entropic system in space-time, whether it’s

06:53 the seething form of a star within a larger stellar architectural system, which is to say a galactic system, or the supergalactic system of the universe, which has presently been ever more so efficiently and sufficiently mapped by scientific cosmology; down into cells teeming in a tidewater pool; to

07:20 ecosystems of relationship within civilizations, such as the Gauls or the Romans. These dialogues that occur across pseudo-closed structures. I love the Great Wall of China as a metaphor for the cell wall, or the cell membrane. Understand this necessary permeability of transmutation of energy, change of energy over time, even in terms of ingestion and excretion, behind this process, which

07:48 is synthesized at the level of the survival, reproductive, persistence technology of increasingly advancing, sometimes increasingly blind, organisms toward the persistence mechanism itself. That this real process is behind the locus of the self, or behind the structure of perception, which is the kind of blind procession of nature into the future, with these

08:16 increasing — via channel two architectures — sophisticated technologies, as well as sophisticated ontologies passed down over time, as well as channel one architectures such as the forebrain: genetic proliferations of exceptional individuals capable of grasping superstructures, not just immersed in survival perceptions, right? Purely animal kind of essential-based motivations to continue nature forward in the form of the discrete organism,

08:45 and all of the different,

08:49 for lack of a better word, adaptations or delusions which create the fabric of culture and civilization necessary to power that organism forward in space and time, with the dearth of ontological recognition, which is to say the absence of the sacred. So.

09:11 What you are watching at large is a massive thermodynamic chemical reaction which is being processed at the level of the nervous system of a discretely and reluctantly advancing species of organisms, with the necessary technological capacity to realize itself in cosmological space and time, to realize the character of the being beneath and behind the mask of the

09:38 technological production of the programming of the human species and the animal body in deep time. But this capacity — just because this technology is there, doesn’t mean the organism is sufficiently ripe to utilize it, or sufficiently capable to utilize it to its fullest extent. And this is a question of

10:04 evolutionary capacity at a species level, and the rarity of — I bring up Goethe at the beginning of this lecture — the rarity of a genius akin to Goethe, or Da Vinci, or Leibniz, or Spinoza. I’m talking about true ontology: the absolute ignorance of disciplines as false categories, and the necessity of the recovery of the character of being, because there is the understanding in these sufficiently ripe individuals that the character of being is oneself.

10:34 One’s self cannot be satisfied by the cultural and civilizational mores and the false identity of the individual under name and number and social category. It’s irrelevant. It’s absolute trash.

10:51 Meaningless. So when we discussed, in the last lecture, this subjectivity dilemma, right? And the subjectivity dilemma can be quite simply boiled down: one, to the closed structure of the organism, an illusion, a necessary illusion of persistence to keep the organism, or the form, alive, so it can couple and decouple and then bring forth another step in this experimentational process to bear,

11:21 due to necessary entropic degradation of the organism. That aspect, as well as the cultural aspect that forms out of that necessary delusion, or illusion, right? This is not conscious at all. If it was conscious, it would be a civilization, or civilizations, of enlightened ontology. And the question of persistence itself, as in Camus’ philosophical question of suicide, would be brought to bear and addressed in some sort of public alms.

11:52 So when you’re watching this chemical reaction, I think the essential aspect of it is to realize it is the most unconscious. It is the character of nature itself bringing forth to bear the persistence mechanism through stand-ins, effectively cardboard cutouts of this process, who are becoming ever more sophisticated at

12:21 unveiling this architecture through technology — as in to say, wearing the mask of “this is not what is going on, in fact there is something else going on,” and then there’s the pitch that occurs, and the sale, etc. So when you look at this kind of political economy of pure transaction, or pure persistence, the confidence man — I’ll say Melville again — as being behind the infrastructure of modernity,

12:47 selling something that’s ultimately nothing, and worse, probably sets you back ontologically. This is the character of nature in the most advanced technological modernity the human species has ever known. And that’s precisely, as I discussed in the last lecture, why and how it is so impoverished. Technological advancement is nothing in the face of ontological realization. Technological advancement does not always necessitate or bring about, precipitate, ontological realization.

13:19 We understand this from Heraclitus quite well. So this reactory, as I have called it, this recombination of elements in a thermodynamic, thermonuclear super-space — this is understandable through stellar physics, astrophysics, Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin: the actual process and product of stars themselves,

13:47 to understand the process at that level of production and reproduction, which is to say the energetic centers of any given stellar or solar ecosystem, right? To understand this process

14:12 is grasping persistence across scales, first and foremost,

14:17 but also to understand how that energy reorganizes itself downstream into the terrain of the synthetic, kind of low-level, ground-level experience of organisms as they assemble communities to build beaver dams, cells to build multicellular organisms, or human beings to assemble metropolises and communities.

14:46 Processes of energetic transformation across scales adhere to the same law, and as such they perform the same function. But the lost-in-translation aspect is that, in a scalar sense, the superstructural behavior is the same, but the superstructural behavior is not easily identified, because it’s wearing different clothes, or it’s wearing a different mask. It’s acting upon and within a different surface. And this is why I think

15:16 the human systems themselves can get so complicated and divorced from scientific realities: because there’s so much noise. And the noise is necessarily — in the same way that you would have maybe, let’s say, a butterfly that has the face of a monkey patterned upon its back. It’s survival architecture. It’s veiling architecture. So when we witness the complexity of — the appearing complexity of — human civilization and human culture,

15:45 we’re witnessing sophistication of veiling architecture. We’re not witnessing sophistication of ontological realization. This is what’s critical. That veiling architecture is the response to world of an organism that is still impoverished at the ground level, that is still existing entirely within survival mathematics in space and time. That organism itself is a product of evolution in discourse with its environment,

16:13 and has not yet sufficiently made the recursive leap into ontological consciousness. Kierkegaard is perhaps the single best philosopher and diagnostician of exactly what has to happen here. He calls it the leap of faith. It’s couched within theology and Christianity, but the same principle is live and active in terms of the transformation of the organism in the face of death into and toward characterological union, unity, with being.

16:43 This is why in Buddhist theology the god of death is that which must be overcome, or conquered. It’s not necessarily to say that death is conquered. Death in reality is the transformative principle between pseudo-closed architectures and thermonuclear space. But that the transformative principle is necessarily integrated into the consciousness of the organism sufficiently enough to grasp

17:11 the larger superstructural architecture of the character of being, beyond the transfusion of brief energetic forms, which is beings in and out of space-time, which is the shedding of bodies, as Artaud puts it. So this reaction to stimuli, this biochemical event, is the essential process of the universe at a physical-processes level. We understand this in terms of elemental recombination and fusion production in stars.

17:39 These elements downstream are continuously recombined, admixed, interact in the theaters of environments across scales. And that interaction, elementally, chemically, produces architectures. And that architectural transformation — regardless of your opinion about sentience or non-sentience at the level of the universe, it’s effectively irrelevant.

18:06 What you’re witnessing in real time is the space-time intelligence of persistence, active throughout time in a cosmologically historical sense, from star to cell to human being. To the cultural and civilizational metropolises of production and reproduction, the externalization of this architecture symbolically into language. Hieroglyphics, cave paintings.

18:35 Then again, the system that is able to condense and synthesize the entire history of that symbolic order: artificial intelligence. Understand this, right? This is a scalar process at work in the universe, which is producing increasingly sophisticated technologies of persistence. The symbol has no organs. The symbol doesn’t need to live and breathe. The symbol can be inscribed in stone for centuries. Some of the last artifacts we have of the Olmec civilization are inscribed in stone —

19:05 effectively all of them. They persist beyond the artifact of paper, or the novel, right? These are shorter-time-scale persistent structures. The human organism, same principle, right? These are limitations. When I say persistence against constraint, I’m talking about limitations. There are configurational limitations, as in sediment, stone, and there are configurations of persistence that are volatile, organic.

19:39 These are different systems,

19:45 geologically and cosmologically, that are active, are obeying different superstructural laws within the larger ontological architecture of persistence. A stone does not have to regulate its nervous system. A stone exists at this low, low, low, low, low —

20:08 describe it —

20:13 low-maintenance configurational.

20:17 So when you’re looking at all of these different reactions, right — and this is what Blake is speaking about when he says, if man saw everything as it was; he sees through narrow chinks in his cavern.

20:31 When I’m talking about perception, we’re talking about the entire technology of the organism sensorily, which is processed neurally through the genome, which is acculturated and entrained and epigenetically altered through experience, which we call trauma history. Dialogue with world: the organism in dialogue with world, acquiring various experiences, injuries, violations, et cetera. This deep historical entrainment is itself the organism encountering reality,

21:01 which is to say reality is never encountered by the organism. It is encountered by the entire historical payload of the organism. So you have the biochemical hormonal technology, as well as the genetic neural technology, the synaptic architecture. This whole being is encountering being from within that mass historical, sedimentary, geological entrainment of the entire genealogy of the human species, within and through a specific stream

21:31 of the gene into the present moment, which is carrying the entire baggage of that architecture. It’s incredibly sophisticated. And this is what produces, at the local level, the real kind of impossibility of a collective humanity. Because the similarity at a cosmological level is effectively blanket. But the similarity at a local level is so diverse,

21:57 on the continuum of experience and capacity to perceive, which is sophistication of neurological and synaptic architecture, cognitive capacity, processing, that you are dealing with such radically different local organismic experiences of reality, even at a species level, notwithstanding trans-species, right? That’s an entirely different linguistic dialogue, right? Different processing architecture with different orientations toward different means,

22:25 although really for similar ends: survival, persistence, reproduction, whether that’s sexual or asexual, right? That there are the necessary glues of civilization, culture, cosmology — the stories that we agree upon to believe, the names that we call ourselves, the paperwork that we sign, the bureaucracies and aristocracies that we worship — all of which are nothing but just the implicit

22:55 agreement that we are all going to say that this is real. Right? And this is another part of entraining perception. Understand channel one and channel two architecture. Channel one entrained perception is biochemical. It’s genetic. It’s the actual capacities of the organism. Channel two entrainment is cultural, civilizational, and symbolic. Even the language that I’m speaking now — this is entrainment, which allows me to reach across a

23:25 structural gap,

23:29 which is the organism itself, to express the experience of the organism itself. Hence existential philosophical literature. So from this point

23:46 you have the situation.

23:50 And the situation itself is entirely in relationship to being. Understand this. Relationship to being is so innate, so present, ever-present, so ingrained, that it makes everything else look like an absolute farce, by the nature of that ingrained beingness. That is the very nature of existence as it is being experienced synaptically and somatically at this very moment by the organism, in all

24:19 spaces and in all times. It is presence, which we experience as perception. It’s a sort of existential horror, that the entire being has been compressed down into this sophisticated, millennial technological architecture, which is simultaneously entropic and capable of reckoning with the entropic nature of its being, as well as the character of persistence that it absolutely is: that foundation beyond all name and number and identity

24:49 that exists in direct relationship to the problem of entropic continuation, right? And the strategies that have been developed epochally to deal with that, which is reproduction, civilizational systems, caste systems, right? All of the horror and violence that occurs out of the pure persistence module, which is instilled as a hardware, the superstructure within all.

25:19 That is what we are experiencing, and it is what you encounter within all things. So when you look in the eyes of a cat, or a dog, or another human being, or a bird; when you encounter a tree or a plant in the wildlife — although obviously an entirely different, we’re talking about flora and fauna, there’s a deeper diversity there —

25:45 you are encountering this persistence architecture encoded into different hardware structures, right? Different genetic Urpflanzen, so to speak, to work with Goethe here. Genetic Urpflanzen, which are entire species-level architectures, which are in the process of transformation and transmutation via the creation of a false diversity, which allows for the proliferation of evolutionary possibilities.

26:14 And this is profound. This is the persistence — the grand, profound intelligence of the persistence architectural mechanism.

26:25 Extremely profound. That there are multiple different species-level architectures solving the same problem at any given moment in time. Not only fauna, but flora. This is the character of being at work in this vast geological jungle, even within just the space of the Earth, notwithstanding cosmological architectures, which we don’t sufficiently know enough about. Can’t see that far. We attempt to, right? Very little knowledge. Barely any. Nothing.

26:56 That these trans-species intelligences — you’re looking into the eyes of, or you are in the presence of, something almost untranslatable in terms of linguistic difference at a species level, or a flora-fauna level, but at the same time fundamentally the same at a characterological being level. In this —

27:25 This reaction is, at ground, what you are experiencing in nature. This is self-and-world dialogue. It is simultaneously the sublimity, the horror, the beauty, and the awe of witnessing this natural, superstructural, persistence-level consciousness — whether you want to call it consciousness or not, it’s semantic, doesn’t matter. You’re witnessing the persistence operator in action through

27:53 all of these different architectural forms, including stones. Configurational persistence is something that we do not sufficiently understand. It persists. It is being in time.

28:10 What does that mean? Right? And this is the question of ontology. This is the entire question of human existence. The only question that matters.

28:19 Yes, we need enough food, water, and shelter to sustain ourselves. Yes, we generally need a community architecture to support one another in times of struggle or turmoil. Everything else is ontological.

28:32 Every other question, every other transcendental importance that we experience in the act of being human, for however long, is an ontological problem about the question of being, the character of being — understanding it, being in relationship to it, because it is ourselves at the deepest level. Motivations, desires, character, the essence of who we are and what we are experiencing, beneath and beyond and behind all of the biochemical, hormonal,

29:01 neurological architectures, which are the technology which enable us to come into beingness, formal interaction. And the forebrain makes this dialogue that we are currently having possible at the level we are having it, which is transcendental. So.

29:29 This is kind of the beauty and the strangeness of the everyday. And this is what I’m trying to bring to bear: the beauty and the strangeness of the everyday. All of these compensatory architectures, the noise and the nonsense of civilization and culture — humanity itself is distracting itself from this primordial question of its unity with the fabric of the very nature that it is systematically destroying at a local level.

29:55 The irony. The farce. The hilarity.

30:01 This question is the only question that resolves any of the death anxiety, that resolves any of the existential ennui, that resolves any of the meaninglessness that permeates every aspect and element of modernity — civilizational modernity, of empty transaction, of desecrated material, including the human body,

30:28 emptied of this transcendental sacredness which permeates all things at different gradients of cognition, complexity, design, architecture, right? The intelligence of nature, which has been systematically evacuated from human culture due entirely to greed, ignorance, some combination of the two —

30:53 the historical necessity of blindness to bring about the condition of absolute necessity of recognition, perhaps, right? Who’s to say?

31:07 So this environment that we encounter, I’m suggesting, is so deeply loaded, so deeply normalized by ignorance and distraction and the inability, or lack of desire, to delve deeply into precisely what constructs and produces it: the millions of years of process that create the product of vision, or perception, through this

31:35 complex neurological, genetic, biochemical infrastructure, hormonal infrastructure, which perceives through the technology of the human being, world — and then simultaneously everything therein, in a world sense, of beings in different stages and processes and designs of technological order, emerging from the Urpflanze of persistence:

32:03 these solution spaces with different gravities, sigils, processes, and perceptions in relationship to the technological order in which they exist. So the technological order of the human forebrain is a technological order of difference that we cannot necessarily understand, as we reside within it — just as, locally, this technological order

32:32 is split into very different and diverse neurological, genetic, and biochemical streams, even hormonal streams just between sexes, right? This downstream diversity is a forking river of veins, or neurons, which are themselves possibilities and capacities. And then there are the paradigms of technological architecture, which create

33:01 new valences of experience within the domain of, let’s say, the superstructural real of nature itself, the history of the Earth, or the history of the cosmos:

33:16 this perception being made available at all of the different levels of experience that are possible technologically, right? Even just in terms of flora and fauna, not even going into the history of mankind and therein — even in the age, or the epoch, of the forebrain — all of the different configurational possibilities therein of sophistication. That all of that which is possible at any given moment is performing processes

33:44 in various different stages of awakening toward the character of nature and being itself, which is the highest, highest, highest calling

33:55 possible, at least in mankind. Who’s to say what’s going on in other species’ orders? Ontological study. The study of being. The recursion — not only the recursive technological process of the forebrain, which is critical reflection, dialectical redoubling, but recursion onto the characterological process of being itself, and the higher identity which emerges through, beyond, and behind the technological masks

34:24 of the being which wears it, and comes into Artaudian, Rimbaudian realization, Dostoevskian realization, Kierkegaardian realization, Heraclitean realization, Abhinavaguptan realization, Lispectorian realization of being itself.

34:46 What is going on outside of that, on a spectrum,

34:52 is the process of this realization emerging from the ground of latencies, technologies in the process of realizing their architecturality, which is to say their construction.

35:10 And this is the realization akin to an existential death, which is avoided at all costs in human civilization, because it would collapse the infrastructural grids of culture, power systems, social status systems, which delicately and precariously uphold the illusionary state of this, uh, mechanism of all of these different selves with their desires, and the information technology which motivates, hormonally and biochemically,

35:39 the lifespan of the organism. Of course, all of these different desires are siloed and classified and categorized and made into language by cultural outlets. And this is the vast strip mall of humanity, right? Everything that can be bought and sold, the goods and services of the hormonal appetite from life until death. But at the same time, this is a cusp, right? As I’ve said, it’s at the edge of civilizational and species transformation. That’s where these

36:09 lectures emerge from.

36:15 This is something Nietzsche understood quite viscerally.

36:20 So.

36:33 I think that’s about it. I think it’s pretty covered here. So I hope you enjoyed this one, and I will catch you later.

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The Consciousness That Transcends the Animal

Sep 27, 2026 — Lecture

Thrown into the body

I want to speak about the human situation and its most basic constraint: entropic mortality, for lack of a better word. As I’ve described, the organism exists in an entropic universe, a pseudo-closed container, and it must persist against constraint. My persistence operator follows from this, and I’ve written a full book-length document on its human derivations.

Looked at clearly, with practical eyes, the human situation is persistence against constraint in an organic body that is degrading entropically. Heidegger calls this being thrown: human beings, all beings, are thrown into existence. That’s correct as a description of consciousness, of sentience rising up from within the technology of the body. Even the limits and ethics of our perception emerge from that foundation.

So my question with baseball, and the reason I keep taking it deeper into baseball, is this: what is possible? What is possible when man becomes conscious within the animal organism, when he rises into sentience and awareness of the human condition? What capacities become possible then, in art, in literature, in human existence itself?

A creature of habit

Sartre describes the existential predicament as total, dizzying, vertiginous freedom. I fundamentally disagree. That freedom is a perspective that has to be reached. It is the privilege of reaching for the consciousness that transcends the animal.

The animal’s situation, as in a sort of Kafka parable, sits between past, present, and future. The animal carries all of its genomic and neurological baggage into the present moment of entrained perception and entrained structures: the deep history of the body, patterned architecture all the way down to neurological behavior and genomic architecture. Culture itself then forms spheres of representation of this fundamental historical problem.

What you really have is a creature of habit. It is shaped day to day neurologically, that shaping feeds into the stream of the genomic architecture of the deep-time organism, and the whole thing is replicated in culture as a representation of the condition of being human.

Understand what I’m saying. The behaviors we experience, animal behavior, human behavior, the behavior of nature, are those of an entrained creature of habit. It’s the cat that needs to be fed in the morning. It’s religious prayer in the elaborate temples of human history. It’s the advent of cultural language. All of this is an epoch of the almost totally unconscious being, endlessly replicated across symbolic spheres of representation.

I’ll say it again. There is genomic architecture. There is neurological behavior responding to conditions, combined with the genomic seed of the architectural body, which at this point is neurological. We’ve talked about the forebrain, the nervous system, the organ systems. Taken as a whole body, this is the experience of being human, the experience of being. We went over the differences in entrained structures across flora and fauna in the September lectures.

What I want to suggest now is how difficult it is to reach this transcendental consciousness from within the sedimentary body of the animal, the body of deep time. When you look at the world, you’re seeing constraint-based organisms experiencing the limits of their consciousness, depending on a variety of factors. Nearly all of those factors are our sedimentary ground: the physical body, the sensory body, the nervous system.

These limitations are architectural. They are ontologically by design, first and foremost a matter of persistence against constraint in an entropic universe. The organism is a technological attempt at a solution. The human being is a solution space, solving for the animal, or, if you reach for the deeper ground, solving for being in time.

Baseball and the repurposed animal

This is why most of my ontology moves from stellar fusion, evolution, thermodynamics, and thermonuclear processes down into the animal. It follows genomic evolution through a variety of species and cultural milieus of perception, into the human, into the forebrain, and then into the solution space I would simply call modernity: the entire history of the forebrain. Within that space, as we discussed, exponential technological revolution is inevitable. It means cracking the systemic codes of nature and understanding physical processes as patterns. Many of our best pattern-solvers, from Spinoza to Newton, were reaching for the consciousness that transcends the animal.

I love baseball because it channels this animal body, this somatic body, into a cultural artifact. The game expresses the deep-time architectural history of the human being onto the field of play. It gives that history movement, activity, direction, and orientation, and those are not predicated strictly, or even mostly, on natural rules of survival and reproduction.

What I’m talking about is repurposing the sentience that emerges from this sedimentary process of deep space and deep time. That is the form of consciousness mankind is reaching for in the radical liberation Sartre describes. The ability to step into the existential question depends on first realizing it. It requires a conscious redirection of energies that were previously dedicated to survival and reproduction.

The trance of the everyday

When we look at these entrained structures, we’re looking at the epoch of unconsciousness: the trance state, the somnambulism of natural processes in perennial and persistent function. Much of what we experience as the normalcy of the everyday, the vast majority of being human, is exactly this.

Do you understand what I’m saying? Being human is not nearly as much of a conscious choice as so many think it is. The directions prescribed by the genomic architecture and its superstructure dictate the behavior of the organism in space and time.

Becoming conscious of this is itself how you achieve the necessary distance from the somatic animal body. That body acts and reacts instinctively in space and time for preservation, survival, and reproduction, running ancient pathways that persist at the species level. My species-mind lectures matter here. At the species level, those pathways sustain a collective intelligence reaching toward a revolutionary consciousness, one that will fundamentally stabilize it within the ontological paradigm of persistence against constraint.

In the Heraclitean sense, what lies behind persistence against constraint is being at play: Aion as a child at play. That being is what we are reaching toward. What stands between us and it are the literal architectural, physical, processual realities, the entrenched structures of deep history and patterned architecture, which shape the body and effectively consume it technologically.

Prometheus and the leap

This is Shelley’s Prometheus. It is Prometheus itself, archetypally, and it is Blake’s massive lifetime project: free energy, liberating the energy within the human genomic project, which has become a cage for it.

That is why baseball, or play, matters. These gestures are not dedicated to ritual, preservational functions. And that takes us into the radical philosophical and ontological ground of what art and creativity really are. Art is taking the situation, the solution space of being human, and throwing oneself into the abyss in a Kierkegaardian sense. The knights of faith are those who leap from the ledge of being into the risk of non-being.

In many ways that is communion with God. What happens there is a voluntary, revolutionary stripping away of the neurological and genomic patterned architecture of all of human history, deep history, and deep time. These are the entrained structures that imprison the history of all human civilization, all human life, and, in large part, nature itself.

When Goethe describes the character of nature, he speaks of it as a feminine force: she who is all things and bears no fault, so to speak. This is the unconscious, evolutionary, paradigmatic force of nature, which I’ve described as the blind rat or blind mouse in the maze. It is desperately trying to solve the problem of persistence against constraint, because the fundamental situation is being in the face of non-being, form in the face of the formless, and the predicament of self-realization within the physical, technological paradigm of anything’s existence.

One problem across scales

Consider the human being: eyes, ears, mouth, nose, brain, nervous system, organs. This is a technological structure standing in relationship to the fundamental force that produced it across deep space and deep time. We can trace it back through the cosmological history of the universe to the birth of the cosmos itself, which through time has been experimentally entraining structures in an attempt to solve the problem of anything existing at all.

You could call this a conscious mind, or simply a physical process. Whatever you call it, it is phenomenologically observable across space-time as the fundamental character of being at every scale. It is the same problem as the existence of any star, a fusion device that exists and then dies into non-existence. The same problem is being solved at the cellular level, and even at the level of configurational persistence in stones.

Does the stone or the star wish to continue existing? That’s not necessarily within the domain of our questioning. What is within it is whether it exists or not, as a body in space and time.

That’s a phenomenological problem. Beneath it lies the truth of beingness at the deepest level, between and beyond being and non-being: form and the disappearance of form. This is the force of creation and experimentation that I have called the character of being, the ontological ground of persistence against constraint. It is what we can observe at this moment in history, and these things are changing rapidly. Who knows?

The question of liberation

This is why I always return to the existentialists and to Russian literature. I loved them as a kid, I still deeply appreciate them, and they are the foundation of much of my work. Their question is the question of liberation.

Emancipation is also the question of globalism and globalization. What is a free country? What is the free world? What is a free human being? For the most part, these questions are asked at the level of ideology, nationalism, political power, and economic power. They’re asked in terms of asserting free will in space and time, in a very superficial sense, through cultural artifacts and behavior.

None of this addresses the ontological ground. None of it reaches the root of the problem: the existential condition, the solution space of being human, which is exactly what we’re talking about. Percy Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound probably describes it best. The ground of the problem is the extent of the limitation imposed on the technological situation of man.

That’s a complex sentence, so let me break it apart. The technological situation is the entire existing, transforming state of being that we call mankind. We’ve talked about the forebrain epoch and the opposable thumb. On top of that comes the attempt to scaffold the human situation with cultural or civilizational prosthetics: energetic devices from the light bulb to artificial intelligence, the factory, the car. All of these try to scaffold a human existence that has firm sensory and neurological limits. To put it briefly, it has a nervous system that shorts out, and senses that can only see so far into space and time.

The microscope and the telescope are inventions that let us discover, astronomically and biologically, the extent of our situation. That is why Western science has been so invaluable. Its technological revolutions, including medicine, with figures like Fermi and Marie Curie, let us examine the situation of being ever more closely.

Almost every major scientific innovation of the past 250 years has let us paint a deeper ontological contrast into view. The ontologist has to see across these perceived epistemic divides to grasp the patterned architecture that encompasses all of them. What is the character behind them all? That is perhaps most richly illustrated in the life, times, and work of Spinoza.

This habituation is the trance of nature, from which mankind is only now waking up, ever so slightly, at the level of the group or the species. Throughout history, plenty of people have become aware of this physical process. They described it by different names and gave it different faces across civilizational and cultural divides, or what we perceive as divides.

Shelley and Godwin

I’ve gone into this before regarding Shelley’s relationship with William Godwin, and how profoundly fortuitous, historically, their meeting was. It mattered for Shelley’s philosophy and, beyond that, for his ontology. Understand Shelley, again, as a student of Plato. Shelley is an ontologist writing poetry, and that is not at all well understood.

For his ontological project, the meeting was a major turning point in how Shelley saw the world, revolution, and possibility, and it also led to his relationship with Mary and everything that unfolded over the following years. In their meeting, Godwin proposes an idea to which Shelley is very receptive. Human consciousness, Godwin suggests, is a glacial process. Shelley’s extreme revolutionary urge will be thrown into that stream and will act across time to move this consciousness, incrementally and hopefully, out into the light.

I think Shelley took this on fundamentally, and understood it to be the basis of his project even before that conversation. He was an extremely liberated being in terms of sentience, cognition, and consciousness relative to history, and especially relative to his own period. That means relative to effectively all periods, since all of them are periods of regression, fear of death, and self-preservation.

There are rare figures in history who become conscious of this terrain and reach for the consciousness that transcends the animal. Theirs is an ontological, literary, and philosophical project of existential awareness of being itself.

The gravity well of childhood

The exclusivity of this project is one of the primary problems of history, of human consciousness, and of the species itself. I would say it is the primary problem. Except perhaps in rare conditions, unconsciously, through sport, through forms of play, or in childhood, we are not able to come into communion with that force of being.

In a modern sense, much of this comes from failing to foster communion with being at a conscious level: in early childhood education, in culture, and in the entrainment into systems that the constraint-based organism falls into. Those systems are a kind of sinkhole, a deep, traumatic gravity. I’ve described this in my literary works. It is a black hole of the deep-history patterned architecture of the genomic being. We are given this technology, and it unfolds into adulthood as a series of patterned behaviors aimed at sustaining the organism and reproducing it at the species level.

We perceive this as individuality. To me, it is the [unclear in recording: “minibian”] forests of human history, and of nature itself. It brings us back to the perception of free will: the perception that a being acts consciously and in integrity with his or her desires in space and time.

It may be true that one acts in integrity with these desires. But we don’t know what those desires are or where they come from. It’s an illiteracy about the condition of being itself. That condition is being thrown into a technological body: beings in relationship to being, the fundamental force of creation at work in and through all of them, the essential, primordial identity of creation itself.

This is why I think early childhood development and education are so important. These entrained structures work at multiple levels as a sinkhole or gravity well, pulling the being down into what Mayakovsky calls byt , the everyday.

Mayakovsky, Goethe, Newton

Mayakovsky rebels against byt with a spiritual and existential fervor that was fundamentally misunderstood by both tsarist and Leninist Russia. The failure of the Russian Revolution is a failure to understand Mayakovsky. This was the subject of my graduate thesis.

Mayakovsky’s understanding of liberation is a poetic one, and when I speak about poetics at the most fundamental level, I mean the liberation of conscious energy. This is what allies Mayakovsky with Shelley. Mayakovsky tries to incite political revolution through poetry, and his poetic works make him one of the vanguards of the Russian Revolution. But he is fundamentally misunderstood. The revolutionary creative urge, which is at the root of all being, gets sublimated into a political and economic program, and that program merely repeats the same entrained, deep patterned architectures.

When Dostoevsky says this is a problem no socialist physician can solve, he is saying it has nothing to do with political economy or ideology. It has to do with the infrastructure of being as it is programmed into the human, into the individual, into beings, as a stage in the evolution or transformation of consciousness itself through technological architecture.

This entrancement is what Goethe was researching, trying to understand what exactly it is. And this is what connects Goethe to some of the greatest scientists in history, scientists like Newton, who refused to accept that a physical process was just a physical process. Newton understood extremely well that revealing a phenomenological pattern of behavior is one thing, but it is only the beginning. We have to interrogate what urge or what character that physical pattern comes from, across scales.

To be gridlocked in this condition is what Mayakovsky was fighting, at the deepest ontological and existential level, in early twentieth-century Russia. He was trying to incite awareness of the existential condition of being human by fundamentally empowering the sentience beyond and behind the creation of beings.

So when Mayakovsky writes his poem 150,000,000 , he is trying to create a vessel for the collective, revolutionary voice of the entire Soviet and Russian population, and his posters try to capture the same impulse toward collectivity. It isn’t a political program. It can’t be contextualized ideologically, and that is why his affiliation with the revolution ultimately fails.

It is an existential, ontological program of gathering together the shards of glass that have split off into pseudo-closed entities with their own subjectivities. These are the beings in time we’ve been discussing, trying to come back into communion with being itself through their desires: sexual reproduction, consumption, sustenance, survival. In other words, persistence against constraint.

Beyond the first step

Persistence against constraint may be my contribution to the history of ontology. It’s similar in many ways to Spinoza, and also to structures in cellular biology. But it is just the first step.

Newton’s gravity is the example that makes this clearest. In a broad civilizational sense, gravity is understood as Newton’s great contribution. But look at Newton’s whole project and gravity is just one step in a much deeper process. Largely because of the limits of his time, that deeper process became primarily alchemical. Alchemy was the structural realization of the transformational principle in medieval and early modern conceptions of universal ontological process, from roughly the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries.

Alchemy was a bridge between Heraclitus and the Presocratics and the modern day. Today we have an over-sophistication of extremely specific technological and scientific products. Now, as always, those products have to be unified by an ontological, superstructural perception of the fundamental patterned architecture: the laws of being themselves, operating through all these perceived spheres, dimensions, disciplinary silos, and epistemic divides, which are themselves micro-cultures within knowledge.

This failure to reach the ontological level is why Percy Shelley was called a madman, “Mad Shelley,” at Eton. It’s why Mayakovsky’s project was folded into a political program and never understood by Lenin, by Trotsky, and certainly not by Stalin or the bureaucratic figureheads who replicated and intensified the bureaucratic, power-driven, class-struggle nightmare that is modern Russian history.

It is a failure of perception toward the ground of being. That perception requires a higher level of abstract consciousness: the ability to recognize, reckon with, and realize unities within seemingly disparate epistemic entities, disparate subjectivities or subjecthoods. It is a liberation of closed systems of knowledge, of closed conceptions of being.

That’s why subjectivity has been so important in my work, as you’ll see throughout my lectures and essays going back a long way. And it’s why we return, ultimately, to existentialism, such a powerful philosophical evolution and revolution on the cusp of ontological, epistemic unity in the early twenty-first century.

Let me return to the principle. I like to do this as a kind of scalar recursion, bringing back the rhythms and repetitions. The constraint-based organism experiences the limits of its consciousness depending on a variety of factors, all of them technological: programs written into the device of the genome. These produce a being that experiences reality through measures of sentience, neurologically, sensorily, and through the architectures of the brain.

These are energetic limitations. The organism is, holistically, a series of processes working together, down to the blood, to produce the being in time, the being’s experience of itself in time, and its experience of itself in relation to a world in time. The self-world divide is produced entirely by the entrainment and entrancement of this subjectivity through the technological limits of being in time. And those limits themselves obey the law of persistence against constraint and are in processes of technological upheaval and revolution.

So the history of human ideas and events matters very little. We’ve gone over this: the reality of human history is mostly illusions piled on top of one another, generating events of very little consequence. When I talk about the history of technology, I’m talking about the only thing that ever really happens in human history: scaffolding added to the experience of being human.

That scaffolding is either channel one, like the opposable thumb or the forebrain, or channel two, like the internet, cell phones, television, and radio. It is the being’s desperate attempt not only to persist in time but to experience some measure of the good life, to realize itself in and through time. And this is a limited-time offer.

This technological being persists against constraint in a regulatory sense. It has a nervous system and organ systems that must be sustained energetically with food, water, and shelter. The solution space of being human is limited and degrading, and it is constantly cut through with the pitfalls, fears, and adversaries of living in a jungle of other persistence-based, self-regulating organisms. They too must eat, sleep, and reproduce to survive, at the species level and the individual level. That is where all the perceived action of history comes from: replications of this problem space within the solution space.

Stripping the veil

So we are trying to reach what you might call the transcendental space of experience. We try to use the scaffolding of the human body, or the technological artifacts of civilization, consciously, to experience the transcendental realm: the pre-subjectivity of being itself.

That means experiencing what we are. In the Socratic sense, it is simply the good life: know thyself. At the deepest root, knowing oneself is what the Hindu mystics, theologians, and philosophers understood as the ground of being, Vishvarupa or Brahman. It means understanding that I am, and that the self is a universal, interstellar, cosmological ground.

Through that ground runs all of this technological revolution: star systems, single-celled organisms, the biochemical shifts in tide pools that persistently and insistently create complex organisms trying to survive in a universe of persistence against constraint. We are reaching back into the timeless, into this timeless artifact of being that is present everywhere and yet visible nowhere, veiled, as in the Goethean understanding of nature. We want to be in communion with it and to live our lives with it as our true identity.

In many ways that is a kind of mystical death, as it has been understood across cultures and civilizations, from Meister Eckhart to Ramana Maharshi. To arrive there, we must strip away the veil, the garments of all the technology we have accumulated.

And this is my argument about technological reproduction in the modern age and the exponential growth of technology: ontologically, it makes that space increasingly harder to enter. It may give us a more sophisticated ontological understanding of being. But that sophistication begins and ends with foundational precepts, not with a profusion of distractions. Those cultural and technological devices all signal a solution to the existential problem by way of consumer culture, attention to whatever pops up on screens of light, or participation in some kind of economic charlatanry.

This is what I’ve described as the problem of modernity. There is too much information that does nothing to solve the human problem, the human question, which is how to enter the solution space of our very being. This information lives at the level of disinformation: beings trying to propagate their own survival structures.

When you encounter the detritus of modern culture and civilization, and it is vast, you are effectively encountering advertising and marketing for pure survival. That reproduces the existential ennui of an ontologically destitute, impoverished civilization or epoch, which describes most of human history. Even the churches of old expelled their ontological practitioners because they were not, for lack of a better word, orthodox.

That returns us to the question of education, and of cultural and civilizational orientation. Without the conditions for survival, there is no ontological research program at all, because a being has to be assured of at least some temporary form of being in order to question what it is. We experience this as the great historical battle of rising modern economic ideologies, whether in service of the self, the other, the community, or some other force.

It comes down to an ethical relationship to being. Ideally, in a communal sense, that produces a real relationship to being, which then transforms the relations among beings themselves. This is the highest priority of the age we are now stepping into globally. It’s no longer a problem being solved locally or regionally. It’s being solved almost instantaneously, across Wi-Fi connections, around the world.

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Persistence Against Constraint: Capitalism, Cosmology, and the Denial of Death (Lecture 10/2/26)

So this lecture has been brewing for me for some time.

It sits at an interface in my own life. In my early and mid teens, I was very invested in critical economic and political theory. As I grew older, into my twenties and late twenties, I turned increasingly to science and ontology: thermodynamics, astrophysics, cosmology. For a while I wondered why. I think I was looking at the problem from the outside in, starting with existentialist literature and existentialist literary philosophy.

I looked at the problem from the most direct human perspective: what are the human problems? There is obviously the existential problem, the problem of existence itself, which is the ontological problem. That is the fundamental one. But then there is how that fundamental existential problem situates itself in space and time, which is history, politics, economy, and so on. In a modern sense, the human condition stands primarily in relationship to itself through dominion over nature: the conquering of territories, colonialism, empire, and the institution of economic and caste systems that control and allocate resources.

So the question, fundamentally, is capitalism and cosmology, capitalism and ecology, capitalism and ontology. All of that is simply to ask: why is the human being the way it is? Why do we have these elaborate, labyrinthine political treatises and ideologies, such as the Declaration of Independence, capitalism, feudalism, the age of empires, the divine right of kings? How does all of this come about, and why?

The answer, of course, is right in front of our faces. It is the bare fact of the persistence ontology, which is persistence against constraint. The fundamental theology behind it is to take more and give less. I want to explain that, especially as it pertains to the hyper-capitalist, hyper-accelerated modernity we currently live in.

You see it characterologically. It is satirized in Gogol’s Dead Souls , and I think Dostoevsky takes this primarily from Gogol. It is the existential realization of being in time. They don’t have these specific terms, but it is the realization of the thermonuclear pseudo-closed system, the pseudo-closed organism in space and time, which is continually leaking energy, which entropes, degrades, and disperses. You can see this when you look at a lone brain synapse gesticulating in space.

The idea of political exile in early human history rests on the same principle: being lost in the wilderness inevitably leads to exponentially degraded conditions. That is why we have civilization, or why we have a tribal context. Bringing people together significantly increases the group’s chances of survival in the wilderness and in nature. That is the birth of civilization.

Within that context, we have the primary issue. I want to keep this dialectic in place: capitalism, selfishness, and ontology. We are looking at something bare and simple. It sits fundamentally behind all the fancy philosophical and psychological dialogue and the vast majority of cultural conversation, which is just noise with no real substance. But beneath all noise there is an inkling, a modicum of truth.

The human being is in an impossible situation: the absurd situation, the No Exit situation, as in Sartre. That is the degradation of the organism. The organism can become aware of its own technology, which is persistence against constraint, but that awareness does not change the fundamental phenomenological position of the organism, which is being in time. The organism is still being in time. It can, however, become aware of the ontological subject, the singularity: being itself as it manifests recursively across scales in time, which is the cosmological history of being. To become aware of the character does not necessarily change the character.

So when we look at capitalism, or “take more and give less,” it is a very simple principle of conservation of energy, which you witness and observe in nature. You watch it in political practice as well, in all these fancy jargons and ideologies in competitive discourse: war, political sloganeering, or revolution, which attempts to overturn systems of power in order to institute new systems of power. So humanity is in an existential gridlock due to the nature of being itself.

This is precisely why Dostoevsky says there is an evil that no socialist physician can diagnose. What he is discussing is the ontological ground from which humanity springs: persistence against constraint. This is the fundamental character of being. It applies nationally, globally, and cosmically, across all scales.

So when you look at capitalism, or at the supposed evils committed under capitalism, whether genocide, murder, scandal, scam, or fascist oligarchy, these are all just fancy terms for the exercise of persistence against constraint to its fullest extent. This is obviously untenable, because it creates situations of further wilderness, further terror, and further madness. You hit extreme moments of fascist activity, in the 2020s, say, or the mid-twentieth century.

What we’re talking about is that you have all these liberal philosophical gates or mechanisms that act much like political theologies, much as the divine right of kings was understood historically. The liberal philosophy of the Enlightenment gives rise to modern civilization, modern Europe, the modern empire as we understand it. These philosophical containers narrate, or narrativize, this condition.

When you talk about Enlightenment philosophy, or the story of the divine right of kings, or Russia using the severed hands of ancient princes and priests in war to inspire soldiers to march toward the divine project of liberating Russia from Ukraine, or whatever territory it is, you are looking at the ceaseless, endless repetition of narrativizing the same principle. That principle is being upscaled through the civilizational model, which is the power model of oligarchs and elites. These people use ideological or narrative containers to dictate, presuppose, and message this hierarchical state of existence.

This goes deeply into religion, and deeply into the intersection of church and state, which at the level of ontology are fundamentally the same thing. They articulate and do the same thing. They suppose a hierarchy, which is then transposed onto culture, which is then transposed onto the civilization, the tribe, or the group.

This is what’s critical. What we’re looking at is really nothing in particular, but what you see through that lens is a narrativization of existence. The ontological principle of persistence against constraint is active from cell to star to human being, across the entire cosmological history. But when you look at human history, culture, civilization, religion, ideology, media, state systems, governments, and empires, you are looking at a narrativized construction through which persistence against constraint is prioritized toward specific power groups, power systems, and individuals who supposedly hold higher standing within these constructs of so-called “communities.”

So when I talk about capitalism and “take more and give less,” I mean something that will remain ceaselessly unchanging unless there is real, true awareness of what underlies it: what creates, transposes, and composes the self into space and time. Political revolution is really just power changing hands into newly constructed systems. That holds whether it is czarist Russia overturned into Stalinist Russia or the British Empire overturned into the American Empire. You are looking at the fundamental mode of power, which is the thermonuclear condition of the ontological being in space and time, the human being. The entire narrative universe of self and other is constructed on top of it. That universe is articulated in speeches, lectures, political rallies, religious texts, and so on, which form channels through which power and force must flow into predictable outlets.

This is why belief is so important, and why the question of truth is so important. If belief and truth are not understood as ontological territory, they are understood as civilizational or cultural territory. Then they are subject to the power narratives of different civilizations, oligarchs, and monarchs, and to control methods and levers such as state media or religion. Through these, power must flow, actions must take place, and information must move toward predictable outlets and sources.

Understand what I’m saying here. It is much less about capitalism, socialism, monarchs, oligarchs, democracy, republics, or fascist dictatorships. It is much more about recognizing the ontological territory beneath and within the human experience, which creates the specter of history that Marx vaguely gestures toward. Marx attempts to ground history in material movement, whether currency or economy. He tries to understand the impact of these narratives on the larger movements of the rise, fall, and revolution of civilizations. Regardless of what you think of his ultimate conclusions or suggested remedies, his is the project of understanding history through the lens of political economy.

This is the deepest problem. It is the Dostoevskian problem of the evil that no socialist physician can diagnose. I keep gesturing back to this because there is only one real solution: ontological self-realization. That means realizing being itself, and thus consciously participating in the territory of existence through an active decision.

The decision could be to further this method of “take more, give less,” a natural, unconscious methodology at work in cosmological history. It is the blind rat in the maze of becoming, which we can trace all the way through the forebrain, the hindbrain, and the eons of cosmic development, externally and internally.

But to make a real decision, we must ask: is this something that should be furthered? Should we continue to participate in it? Is it adding to our experience of being human? Or should we attempt to create further possibilities of relation through equitable giving and receiving, establishing a territory of true connection, true relationship, true exchange?

This is the farce of free-market ideology. A free market will only succeed at a global or even regional level if the individuals participating in it are aware of their motivations: where they come from and why. Those are the deep biological and ontological motivations of the body persisting against constraint, hormonally, chemically, and thermodynamically. Individuals must be able to act consciously in light of their mortality. They must understand that mortality as fundamentally interwoven with the character of being at the universal scale. Then they must step into relationship with the desire to interact and exchange with the other as oneself.

This is what’s critical. This is what is hard for humanity to understand, and it creates the gridlock we experience as hyper-exploitative, manipulative capitalism: the capitalism of slavery and oligarchy. It is really the destruction and gutting of the delicately assembled liberal structures, the real liberal philosophy that undergirds modern civilization. That is Enlightenment philosophy: the Adam Smiths and John Lockes who undergird the philosophical presumption of how capitalism functions.

But of course, this thought occurs only at the level of political economy, and it presumes a certain state or status of the subject. Free-market exchange requires an enlightened subject. When there is no enlightened subject, we get the psychopathology of modern political oligarchies. These are the ruthless consolidation of political and material power through congressional and judicial structures that justify treating the corporation as a human subject. These laws, rules, regulations, and thinly veiled democratic structures of voting and the ballot are in reality undergirded by millions of dollars from political super PACs. These PACs advertise, market, and ultimately proclaim that there are one or two candidates, privately sponsored and donor-backed, who will step into these seats of so-called people’s political power and institute conditions that will benefit the common person. That is frankly not the case, precisely because of the economic backing that puts these people in those seats to perform those tasks.

So this is the underlying corruption. As Dostoevsky says, it is not a political-ecological or political-economic corruption. It is a cosmological corruption: the limited identity of the self as it pertains to persistence against constraint in the body.

In Christian theology, the concept of evil or the Fall is really the fall of being, or the fall of God, into the splintered, divided, fragmented self. That self must then exist within cosmological rules, the superstructural rule of persistence against constraint as it pertains to the thermodynamic, thermonuclear body. That body lives in an entropic universe and is a pseudo-closed system. The body is not bounded. The body is always already in a state of dispersion. This shows even in day-to-day consumption and excretion: bodily fluids, bodily activity, sweat, breath, excretion.

So we must understand the human being, the human system itself, as a process. We have gone into that in depth genomically, ecologically, and cosmologically.

Then you have the condition, which is not the political subject. It is the ontological subject. There is no political subjectivity. This is critical. The ontological subject is the existential being, the existential body in space and time, grappling with the fundamental reality of its condition. Downstream from that come the delusion and illusion that follow from the organism’s encounter with its own existence. In the Buddhist sense, or in Ernest Becker’s sense, this is the denial of death, or else the true encounter with death itself.

This has been incredibly important to spiritual development historically in the East. But in the West, it has been a political project of absolute, forced, and enforced ignorance. I argue this ignorance is necessary for capital. If the fundamental aspect or essence of transformation is denied or ignored at the foundation, that is the death of real philosophy, ontological philosophy. This philosophy dies as Greece dies, really. It comes back with the ontological moves of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, even Heidegger, and Hölderlin as well.

This denial of death is necessary for civilization to function, precisely because the denial of death is outsourced into the political subject, the political product, political power, narrativization, ideology, and Western theology. Understand this as an entire ecosystem of power, running on the fundamental ground of consumerism as the denial of death itself. If death is truly encountered within the political subject, the political subject fractures into the cosmological subject. That is being in process: the being beneath the phenomenological manifestation of the organism and of time itself. This is mission-critical.

So when we look at the underlying esoteric structures that undergird Western capitalism, modernity, and consumerism, now global capitalism, consumerism, modernity, and technology, we see the frantic scaffolding of the organism. It is attempting to build the pyramid, or the temple, through which it will ceaselessly, endlessly survive. That is the immortality project. It is deeply tied to the political, oligarchic project of fascism itself: the consolidation of power in an attempt to preserve the organism.

I really want to get into this in terms of aging, entropy, and especially physical power and physical weakness, because this is deeply tied to a Nietzschean understanding of resentment. We have to understand that the subject’s political power is a deeply physical and somatic phenomenon in relation to being in time. It concerns the physical conditions of existence, and the power within them exists as a robust virility or fertility. That is always what fascist empires propagandize. Make no mistake: underneath this lies a worship of the fundamental, primordial power of existence or creation, which might be conceived as the fertility goddess or the virility god. What is being worshipped is the image of death looking back upon life and frantically trying to consolidate what remains. This is a deeply individualistic project.

So when we talk about the denial of death in Western civilization, it is irreducible from subjectivity itself. It is irreducible from the concept of the bounded individual, the condensed, contained identity of the self, absolutely identified with the body, with the organismic being. That is precisely the illiterate, empty, vacuous materialist context in which Western empire and Western civilization have existed since the pre-Socratics. It is the emptying-out of a being once identified absolutely with nature at the cosmological scale. Instead it is identified so thoroughly with the body, so thoroughly contained within the sensation of being an organism in time, that the downstream effects we experience are guaranteed: capitalism, fascism, modernity, consumerism. They are inevitable, because being itself proceeds from a limited vision of what being is.

Again: critical, critical, critical. If being proceeds from a vision of itself as a temporary, entropic structure, you necessarily get the outcomes of capitalism: take more, give back less.

By contrast, consider another form of political ecology, such as that of the Lakota and other Native American ecologies: yes, take some in order to survive, but give back more. That is the understanding of a political ecology of seven generations, or a political ecology of the relationship between the human being and the bison. This is a highly sophisticated and mature ontological territory.

So when you look at the conquests of colonialism, you are really looking at conquest by a barbaric ontological structure. You are looking at a violent, hyper-localized conception of being, the individual subject, set against cosmologies of the universal. This is not across the board; I’m drawing a dialectic, please understand that.

So when we look at the genocide of Native American peoples, we are looking at the genocide of a universal cosmological structure, articulated and activated in time, however imperfectly. It was destroyed by a political-ontological structure that identifies the self with the body: the individualist, Western, materialist project. That project has downstream developmental and historical effects, namely capitalism as we understand it.

We can understand this quite well through Heidegger: the standing-reserve-ization of nature, the turning of all things in existence, including human beings, into reserve. The tree becomes wood. The human being becomes slave or factory laborer. It is the emptying-out of the sacred. Heidegger seeks a return to the revelation of, or communion with, being itself through Hölderlin’s poetry. Hölderlin, the poet, is in communion with being through his understanding of what nature is. “Nature’s gleaming is higher revealing.” He looks beneath the phenomenological appearance of the self, of the forest, of nature, in order to realize, to understand, and to know oneself. Again, the Socratic maxim: know thyself.

Without this ontological project at the foundation of Western civilization, as I’ve suggested before, including in education and early childhood education, something else has taken its place. It is an empty, consumerist, materialist education in profit, an education in the manipulation and coercion of resources. That is the consolidation of the subject into the body, which is contraction and constriction. It is fundamentally, cosmologically, a conservative vision of reality. So when we talk about conservative politics, we are talking about contraction into the body.

So there are dual aspects at work in history. Understand this in an almost Hegelian sense; this is the relationship between Hegel and Marx, rooted ontologically in the pre-Socratics. It is very simple.

On one side there is the force of self, which is necessarily expansive. My vision of being is cosmological. It is encompassing. It is birth and death. It runs from the birth of the universe through the downstream births of the cell and the human being, through the revolutions and evolutions of the human being. It is a ceaseless stream of transformation. This is deeply Heraclitean, a Heraclitean understanding of the cosmos. It is a liberated, Promethean understanding of the energetic transformation of nature.

Juxtaposed against it is the condition that is the gridlock, the disaster of modernity, global modernity. It is the emptying-out of this cosmological vision of the sacred, which barely ever existed except in some of the greatest philosophical monuments, from Heraclitus to Spinoza. What remains is deeply constricted: individualist, body-identified, social-role-identified, name-identified, clothing-identified. It is the most veiled condition of being, the most constrained, constricted, and restricted perception of being itself, the self itself, and reality itself.

It is garment after garment after garment, as in Gogol’s “The Nose,” or in a Vedantic sense, or even in the sense of Inanna in Sumer. These garments have been put on to such an extent, the veil is so thick, that there is no real ontological perception of being itself. The perception of the being is the name, the number, the job, the address, the height, the weight. All these are emptied, scalar, materialistic descriptors of the organism as an object, an object inhabited by an objection, really. The subject does not exist beyond the reach of this political capture. It is the capture of being itself through supposed structural identifiers that are meant to tell us what is, what being is, what reality is, what truth is, who and what one is.

This is the disaster and catastrophe, because it is such a failing, small, and pathetic vision of reality and existence. From it comes the pathetic, destructive death, not with a bang but a whimper, of these civilizational attempts, these visions, these philosophical foundations. They are, I would say, in large part good-faith attempts to create some possibility for the revolution or evolution of consciousness, or for the persistence of the organism. These are all beings that wish to survive.

But the greater failure is ontological: the failure to recognize what being is. This is persistently stripped from curriculum in fascistic states. Not that it was ever really there, because it takes an extreme threshold of realization even to begin to consider and articulate it. But the total absence of the question of what being is from a politics, culture, or civilization almost guarantees these outcomes. It guarantees the predictable rise and fall of empires through a foundational corruption that is never itself addressed at the deepest level. The deepest question presupposes, orients, and constructs the way things move afterward, if you understand that. It is the higher ideal, the Platonic ideal, through which the aqueducts of history flow.

The failure to ask that question guarantees the point at which we now are.

What I am suggesting, most fundamentally, is that until that question is asked, things cannot and will not change, because change will be forced. It will be forced behavior through artificial constraint: religious ideology, political ideology. Some of it will be obeyed narratively, in terms of belief, and some of it will be disobeyed. None of it will give the human being an existential vision of what it is. And without that vision, behavior cannot change at the level of self-perception, at the level of the primordial identity of being itself.

All ethics are downstream of cosmological self-realization.

So you have Henry VIII, and you have the chaos of today’s world, October 2nd, 2026. All these power systems, power structures, and political-ideological belief systems battle it out in an increasingly globalized, technological space of immediacy and conflict. These belief systems are in reality proxies for the political power of the local, individual self. So of course you don’t have conversations about creating cosmological conditions for persistence. We’re not there as a species, and this is due in large part to humanity’s ontological circumstances at this moment in time.

I think I’ve been pretty thorough here. I’m pretty much done.

But again, when you look at capitalism, and I think Marx is a great example that reveals a lot of this, look at my little catchphrase: take more, give back less. Look at it thermodynamically, thermonuclearly, in terms of persistence against constraint in pseudo-closed systems such as the human being. You are just looking at a practical reality. It could be perceived as greatly evil, insane, awful, or terrible. Or it could be seen practically, as an unconscious nature acting itself out in space and time.

This is like the crocodile, or I think it’s the Leviathan, to gesture back again to the Enlightenment-era philosophical questions of liberalism that became modern civilization. The question of becoming enlightened to the cosmological condition itself is what is really at hand. It must be addressed before we can even begin to consider a free-market economy, or even democracy. In reality, you are trying to institute structures that depend on a stable sense of self.

When you live in an ontologically bankrupt culture, you cannot have such a self. Heidegger says this was fundamentally true at the beginning of the twentieth century, and it has become exponentially more true as civilization has materialized and absolutely lost contact with the sacred. In such a debased culture, you don’t have subjects who can act in integrity with anything other than their survival instincts.

So throughout the Western world, and throughout the globe, you have subjects acting in light of dreams, delusions, and illusions. All of these are manufactured and narratively produced by power systems, religious, political, and otherwise. They are beliefs about the self that are first and foremost cultural. Those cultural beliefs become family beliefs, and then preconceived notions baked into the subject’s perception of reality, being, and existence itself. So you have subjects acting from a perception that can only be described as false at the level of cosmology, astrophysics, deep space, and deep time. It is just fundamentally untrue.

So when you have a room full of political subjects acting from these deluded spaces, you have no real ability or capacity to establish a logical structure or architecture that is mutually beneficial. That is the current state of modern global capitalism. As I discussed in one of my previous lectures, there is a battle, a war, over truth, ideas, knowledge, and information. That war exists because truth, ideas, knowledge, and information are all politically leveraged concepts used to direct energy, profit, property, and wealth.

Again, this has nothing to do with ontology. It has to do with the degraded state of the human condition in relation to the death of the sacred: the loss of the cosmological or ontological perception of the ground of the self. That perception was formerly mediated tribally, locally, and regionally through shamanic participation and shamanic ritual. Ritual opened up the transpersonal ground of existence, allowing the community to participate in being. That being is larger than the sensate, bounded, entropic realm of the individual body at its various stages of composition, recomposition, and decomposition.

So it comes back to identity, and to the identification of the subject as it has been historically, exponentially, and substantially evacuated. The subject is now name, number, job, labor, and so on. That is the standing-reserve-ization of the human being, as I’ve described previously in relation to the transatlantic slave trade and the slave ships themselves. We have to understand this as the political reality, and the horror of it, beneath the veil of ideological concepts like free will and the individual. All of these only serve to constrict and constrain true political possibility.

The expanded ontological perception of the individual as the cosmological subject allows for extensive creative capacity in envisioning relationship, envisioning community, and envisioning prosperity as an ecological principle.

The modern idea of the billionaire or oligarch is a fantastic example of these siloed subjects. You’re ruling over a pile of bones. This is the destruction of the ecosystem in the name of elevating the individual. I’m not sure how enjoyable that actually is. It is a deeply misinformed political perspective with real physical consequences. Perhaps, in the desperation of that leap of belief and the delusion of the private self, it is experienced as some mediocre modicum of survival. But in doing so, we get large-scale ecological, economic, and cosmological devastation.

All of this is due to ontological bankruptcy at the level of the political subject. As I’ve described, it is absorbed as fundamental, absorbed as the developmental concept of individualism. After the pre-Socratics, that concept becomes increasingly justified through the consolidation of political power, and also theological power, in terms of monotheism.

The concept of kingship, or the divine right of kings, as it has long existed, is an idea of relational hierarchy through which power moves, mediates, and unfolds. It is the idea of the one ruler, the one king, the one source of power. Beneath and below it are various operative beings or bodies that must pass information, knowledge, and wealth up through the hierarchy.

So we are living in a historical-political condition where the world’s poor are simply temporarily embarrassed billionaires, in the words, I think, of Steinbeck. The great mass of humanity is nothing more or less than the temporarily embarrassed individual in power. These siloed individualities are ontological manifestations of the failure to interrogate existence. That failure leads necessarily to Dostoevsky’s great evil, which is not fixable by the socialist physicians, so to speak.

So again, we are looking at the grounds of this: an ontological failure of communion with being. The loss of the sacred is not only a felt, lived sense of evacuated communion with God, the divine, the cosmic, or the higher self. It is also the political, economic, social, and cultural conditions all around that fundamental, primary, primordial existential loss of connection with being itself. Those conditions are the evacuated material conditions of trade, exchange, and transaction. They are the desperate consolidation of the political subject, the organism in the face of death. That death is never encountered, because to encounter death is to encounter the sacred, the transformative principle of existence itself, the change of state of being.

And in doing so, we have the basic principle at work, which is nothing more or less than primal exchange: take more and give back less. We see it in the ecological, social, political, and cultural devastation all around us. Many different names, many different faces, one source.

Thank you. I appreciate your time.

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The History of the Universe & Ontology (Lecture 10/4/2026)

So I want to dissect the concept of lila in the ancient Hindu vision of creation. We already talked about cosmic play in terms of Heraclitus. I want to direct it back to the thermonuclear source we have been articulating from star to cell, which we have called the ontology of persistence. But I want to activate or mobilize that idea in the realm of participation, even in terms of the consumption, excretion, and production of the organism in a cosmic web. You can see this web cosmologically, in the mapping of the cosmos itself: energetic exchange across scales, again from star to cell. That relationship is itself the perennial course and discourse of all information and energy forms, in a constant cycle of consumption and production.

So what you are witnessing is the multifactorial game I described before, using Heraclitus’s axiom: the Aeon is a child at play with colored balls. Break that down even to a molecular or cellular level. It is a highly intuitive understanding of atomic structure. It also shows how atomic structure forms the visionary perception of being itself, the phenomenology of being in space and time: how we encounter being, how we interact with it, and how organisms and systems, in a cosmological sense, are fundamentally primed to consume and produce information through energetic transformation.

This returns us to the essential concept we have been discussing: the identity of the self. This is primary to ancient Hindu philosophy, theology, and inquiry into being. You could say the entire history of ancient Hindu thought is primarily an ontology of being, which appears phenomenologically as a religion or theology because of the analogical quality of the information it relays. This is precisely the division we experience historically between science and theology, especially the highly advanced philosophical-ontological theology we encounter in world history primarily through ancient Hinduism, through figures such as Abhinavagupta and the Vedanta tradition.

This misconception of self is the groundswell from which we have undertaken our entire political, existential, cultural, civilizational, and even cosmological inquiry into being. We have already elucidated it scientifically in terms of energetic transformation. The organism itself is a deep-time, deep-space process. It originates from the birth of this version of the universe and runs down through single-celled organisms and genetic structures on Earth, into and through the human being and the advent of the forebrain. Then come all the recursive technological innovations made possible by the dimensional space of the forebrain itself: everything from fire to the printing press to Homer to artificial intelligence and digital space.

In these layers and spheres of abstraction, technological prosthetics become possible precisely because the organism can examine itself and its surroundings. It begins to bootstrap its existence in space and time, both in relation to itself and its own personal technology, and in relation to the world as a technological superstructure. You can see this in everything from the production of medicine from plants to the use of lithium to produce digital spaces. This simulated network of light grids, transmitting digital information simultaneously across massive distances, is the world we now live in, in this period of later modernity, 2026.

To return to the game of the transformation of energy, which is where I was headed with the concept of lila : as the Vedanta elucidates over and over through various sages, or ontologists, which is perhaps the better word, this principle is the only real thing at hand in the universe. This process of energetic transformation creates new, transformed outcomes in a time-space-delineated sense, that is, through movement in time. This is what Darwin traces when he traces evolution. It is what Goethe interrogates when he looks at the archetypal plant.

This principle at work is itself being, or the self, or universal mind, or universal creativity, whatever terminology you wish to use for that activity. I have called it the character of being, in terms of the ontology of persistence. It moves across time and creates phenomenological representations of itself, being in process, manifest in space and time as form.

You witness this over and over. History and science are representative realms in which, to use the phrase again, the forest is missed for the trees. Some event is perceived phenomenologically, and that event is taken literally. It is not seen as a manifestation of the underlying ontological character of being itself: being in the process of transformation across radically heterogeneous time scales. We have expressed this in terms of channel one and channel two architecture: genomic architecture on one side, and expressed technological architecture on the other, such as digital space, the printing press, language, or cave painting.

We have already gone into this. We discussed how the difference between genomic architecture and the architecture of, say, ancient Rome is semantic. They appear divided, but they are homogeneous at the level of scale. The universe itself is a technological process of transformation. Within and through it, space-time is a real activity of relationship: the recombinant transformation of already latent, already present, already active and activating cosmic energy.

This is what’s critical. Within lithium there is the innate potential for digital space. Within oil there is the innate potential for the modern engine. This is really the process of unlocking twentieth-century scientific innovation: there is a ground that has not yet been activated, due to a lack of awareness or consciousness. That is a deeply Vedantic, Hindu conception of the nature of being: the nature of being is obscured, except to the aware.

This leads us back to Hölderlin, “nature’s gleaming is higher revealing,” and to Heidegger’s project. At root, that is a deeply Eastern project of interrogating being, all the way back into and through the pre-Socratic work of Heraclitus, which is really a union of Eastern and Western thought. This critical interrogation of being stands at the foundation of the premodern, which is to say the pre-divisive and undivided, human project of understanding existence. That project then becomes academically and disciplinarily siloed. In the West, I would almost say this happens in a deeply monotheistic religious context, which we have already discussed as a politically informed hierarchy of power sustained over hundreds and thousands of years.

In the East, by contrast, this becomes increasingly colonized territory of capitalist production: the standing-reserve-ization of nature into pure material emptied of the sacred. That means emptied of the ontological interrogation of the trans-scalar totality of being itself. Being is the cosmos imbued with the sacred, and the sacred is the transformative process of existence across all scales: the unifying force, factor, and character that is universal being.

We have already talked about the political and cultural crises that follow from the loss of this lila , and the existential crises as well. It is primarily an existential crisis. We see the outcomes, as we discussed with Becker’s denial of death, in Western civilization itself as a death cult. It is a suicidal cult of the constrained, privatized individual, totally divorced from the universal sacred. The universal sacred was formerly the ground of the cosmological self. It sat at the root of the vast majority of world-historical, tribal, regional, and local cultures, all of which attempted to interrogate the universe by examining the stars and so on.

We have already gone deeply into that ontological loss. But this game, this play of lila , this process of transformation, is not dependent on human involvement or human awareness. That is critical. It is the underlying activity, the thing itself at work, in, through, and beyond all human conception and all natural awareness. It is Goethean nature herself, who can do no wrong, who is always active, always present, always moving. It is what lies beneath all things: the subtle character of existence and being, beneath and beyond all identity and all the narrative garments, devices, and clothing that veil existence from itself in the process of becoming.

This is precisely what we traced through evolutionary genomic history, and what we are tracing at large scale up to the advent of the forebrain, which makes recursive awareness possible in nature. As I have expressed clearly before, this is the primary technological innovation in cosmological history, insofar as humanity is aware, because it allows being to interrogate being itself. That, again, is the birth of philosophy. This awareness is itself what changes nature.

This does not need to be understood in any pseudo-sophisticated quantum-mechanical way. It simply needs to be understood as nature as an unconscious process, acting out the terrain of the energetic transformation of being across space and time. To observe that, not through the lens of phenomenology but through the lens of ontology, is to become aware of how the character of being manifests in and through all things across scales.

The issue, of course, is unifying the scales. That requires characterological insight, superstructural insight into the activity occurring across all of them: from human behavior and human relationship, to the survival of a cell, to an ecosystem of animals in the Sahara, to stellar systems and their energetic relations, the dynamics of stars themselves. The task is to observe the superstructure: that behavior, that character, that pattern.

The basic question in observing energetic transformation is this: what is possible within that change? What I have been suggesting, perhaps subtly and implicitly, and what I am now directing attention to explicitly, is that what is possible is a liberation of that energy. That is Shelley’s Promethean project.

By that I mean the following. Cosmological energy is itself what is being transformed by the character of transformation: persistence against constraint, which then folds into the entropic universal reality of transformation. Those energetic potentialities are then dispersed or transformed through recombination, reproduction, and so on. The project is to have access to that substrate in an authentic, integral way. That access must not be veiled by, say, the hormonal innocence of genomic beings, or the technological infrastructure of genomic beings, which creates an enfolded template through which these beings act. Which is to say, they are not free.

This brings us to the question of free will, and the answer is rather simple. Technologically, the energy is constrained within the organism in accordance with the laws of that being. The organism manifests in space and time as a technologically unfolding process of innovation and transformation, in accordance with the precedent from which it emerges.

I think there is some trouble understanding this in popular, public, and even technically professional takes on quantum mechanics. Beings do not simply emerge from nature. Nature is the process from which beings emerge, and so beings emerge in a deeply historical and materially informed way. They carry a profound cosmological imprint of deep space and deep time, and accordingly they occupy a particular place and time in their relationship to being itself. This technological process, even in the human being, is fundamentally genomic. It is a process of information-technology transformation over time through recombinant reproduction.

Understanding this station of beings, we stand in relation to nature in such a way that man, or any being in particular, is not free. This is the fundamental existential problem articulated by Percy Shelley in Prometheus Unbound. Prometheus is bound by Jupiter, who we could say is God with a capital G, the god of the cosmos in the Greek sense, Zeus, the highest god. Humanity is bound within the manifestation and articulation of the greater force through the vessel of the being. So Prometheus is chained to the rock, chained to the mountain, which is to say chained to the configurational structure of time, a Saturnian idea.

I don’t want to get too caught up in the mythology, because it isn’t helpful. The primary issue, the Promethean problem of returning fire to man, is simply returning life to man in the most fundamental, absolute, existential, and essential sense. It means bypassing the phenomenological architecture of the human being to return the free principle of cosmological energy to beings.

This is the great problem and the great paradox of existence: to be a manifestation of that process, and yet to be encaged within a technological, superstructural articulation of it, with firm bounds, rules, and regulations. That is what we have articulated as persistence against constraint, and then the architecture of the human body in relation to the entropic universe. Survival is what is always already trying to be solved.

But the question is whether, within the technology itself, within being human, we can access the capacity to experience or participate in that free play of energy.

Consider Goethe again, and his idea that you don’t need to go to the asylum, because the open world is a madhouse. What he is saying beneath that is that man is entirely unfree and entirely possessed by the demon of his own existence: persistence against constraint in a closed technological form. Man is unfree at the level of the prison of beings themselves, without awareness of being and without the ability to articulate it or participate in it meaningfully. What you witness is the desperate survival cult of mankind, which is really its death cult, as it tears itself apart.

Within that problem, as we’ve discussed, there are the rare ontological practitioners who are truly solving for existence in terms of what is possible. That means being here now, being in this time, being in this body. It is a deeply spiritual, even mystical, question about my relationship to what I fundamentally am. So first, what I fundamentally am must be understood.

That is the project of any great science, just as it is the project of any great mysticism. This is why I bring up Vedanta and the ancient Hindu tradition. Its backbone is interrogation, questioning, and inquiry into being itself, not presumption, belief, or dogma about being. It is real philosophical inquiry, and that inquiry composes the fundamental aspect of the spiritual tradition. The people who create the tradition are the ontologists who lay its ground. Abhinavagupta is primary to that, which is why I bring him up, and Shankara as well, and of course the later practitioners of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, such as Ramana Maharshi and Nisargadatta.

So my question was: what unifies Heraclitus, Spinoza, Newton, Darwin, or Einstein with these figures? The unifying force is the primary ontological ground, which must be accurately understood in order to live a life well lived, a meaningful life in the Socratic sense. One must interrogate what one is, and then, from that understanding, see what ground might be opened up to live or experience it.

This is why Heidegger raises the alarm of ontological crisis in the 1930s. He sees the absolute destitution of this faculty, of this meaningful interrogation, in Western culture and civilization at that time. Of course, it has only degraded further since. The capacity even to perceive that such a thing has been lost is central to Heidegger’s situation and inquiry.

So the free play of this energy requires conscientiousness about the architecture through which it is being perceived. That is simply the principle of self-awareness at the level of beings and their technology. This has proven strenuously difficult in Western civilizational history, and in Eastern civilizational history as well. Again, these are the rare figures doing this ontological work.

The fantastic part, as you watch Western modernity unfold into global modernity, is that the technological apparatuses become increasingly sophisticated, and yet there is no awareness of the fundamental technological apparatus: the human being as a manifestation of being itself. The human being is a technological mode capable of recursive consciousness. It generates all these complex digital, energetic, metallic, and even chemical systems out of its recursive forebrain-mind, which is a technological revolution at the level of the species paradigm. And yet the ability of this being actually to interrogate its own beingness is somehow impossible, nonexistent.

That is the primary farce, the Gogolian farce of humanity and human history: the human being has little to no awareness of the primary technology through which it perceives.

This is very much William Blake, and it is Blake’s primary claim as an ontologist. The being does not have technological awareness of what it is, because it is itself a productive and produced technology, a vision of nature through which it envisions nature. It can produce all these high-falutin energetic devices with oil, chemicals, and machines. It can even replicate the fusion of stars. Yet it cannot perceive itself as a technological being barely raised above the ontological substrate of existence. By “raised above” I mean that it is an expression or an embossing of being: it is a formal manifestation of being itself.

This farce points to the fundamental scientific revolution. That revolution has been underway for thousands of years, since the birth of recorded human history, and yet it has never come to full realization or full ritualization. Why? Because it requires massive adoption, massive recursive awareness of the primary technology itself, and a real articulation of the full body of that technology.

That full body runs from the neuroscience of thought, to the interrelationship of the organ systems, to the understanding of cellular metabolism in the body. As of the early twenty-first century, these are still siloed disciplines, with awareness that is still vague and misunderstood, particularly regarding the brain.

These specialized domains are critical to the formation of modern Western thought, and they are still under interrogation. They are not even understood phenomenologically, let alone inter-dimensionally, as with dissipative structures. Even within these specialized scientific fields, whose practitioners are usually highly educated, there is no ability to sufficiently understand the single phenomenon itself. There is even less ability to scale that phenomenon in relation to multiple other complex domains and form a full picture of knowledge.

This is the gridlock of modern ontology, because ontology always requires as much scientific awareness as is available. As human history progresses, more and more specialized, high-contrast scientific information becomes available across increasingly diverse disciplines. That information must be unified, but it must also be understood at the disciplinary level. So understand this as a communal project of awareness.

Furthermore, once this full ontological picture is made available in a practical way that unifies the historical, political, theological, and scientific, it must be accurately and adequately communicated, expressed, and understood. Then it must be adopted to the best of humanity’s ability. We can see how well that is going in the religious wars of the early twenty-first century, in political battles over perceived energetic scarcity such as oil, and in ideological belief systems. Those systems stem from religious belief systems that must be reconciled in a global digital environment of increasing international exposure at the speed of light. Space and time have been condensed and whittled down to a point, and the human being’s ability to assimilate these vastly diverse ideas appears to be slim to none.

So this is a very ill-off and unadvanced species. It is having incredible difficulty just surviving within the most fragmented, splintered paradigm, let alone perceiving the possibility of a unified one and beginning to adopt it at the practical, operative level. That would be an articulated unity of existence in a global sense. It is a real political space and a real political possibility, because it is the fundamental ontological reality of being itself.

So this project, like all things, starts at the level of the individual. To enter into the space of this free play of energy is to undergo the process of interrogating or inquiring into what one is. It means being open, in both senses, to the mystical and the scientific, as historical markers left by those who have also undergone this procedure.

So one need not undergo this procedure in a vacuum. There is great benefit in drawing on and communing with the historical structures of science, ontology, philosophy, existential literature, and so on, to form a full picture of reality and being alongside one’s own direct experience, interrogation, and experimentation with nature and existence.

This is not a project that can be forced. But conditions can be put in place that make it more possible for this real interrogation of being, at the level of the individual, to become politically popular, or more ever-present. That would fundamentally require transdisciplinary education, and the fostering of real critical inquiry into existential recursion, that is, contemplation of being. And it would require this to be the primary redeeming principle and primary function of civilization and culture.

This is what I have already argued about a large portion of ancient world history: civilizations and cultures were organized around this existential artifact as their groundswell, their center, their central function, meaning, and reason for being, and for being in community.

And of course this has been turned into a capital enterprise, an enterprise of material transaction, currencies, credit scores, debt, and power. All these relationships are superficial and surfeit when it comes to the actual meaning, purpose, and importance of life, which is to understand being. The substitute for understanding being is power: political power, political economy.

So with the failure to understand being, we have substitutes, which I have discussed in complete detail in terms of consumerism, status, and so on. They are attempts to fill the lack, or replace what is lacking.

This is why, when we discuss lila , or the liberation of the organism out from behind the technology in the Blakean sense, Blake is the reference point. If man sees only through narrow chinks of his cavern, and things were revealed as they are, he would perceive them as infinite. That is what Blake is talking about. He is talking about energetic transformation across cosmological, universal time scales, being able to see that whole process, and understanding oneself as indistinguishable from it.

What we are really discussing is, unfortunately, at the species level a very high state of being, one that seems rarely accessible. Any problem downstream of that existential divide, in modernity and in the history of humanity, has continually been substituted with dogma, power, social systems and structures, and manufactured identities. These are essentially fictions for the benefit of the organism’s survival.

So when we examine any human problem, any ecological problem, any problem the human being perceives as experiential or to be experienced, that is what lies behind it.

That is why my focus is always on ontology. Ontology is the primary superstructural problem of human existence, as expressed in Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound : Prometheus is bound by the technological form itself. So when we talk about the liberation of the human being, we are talking about the liberation of the fundamental ontological character of cosmic energy. That energy is hidden, veiled, or buried within the human being as a technological, sedimentary process across space and time. We have talked about epigenetics and trauma, and I have already written those texts, so we don’t need to keep going into them.

But understand this as nature’s own problem, in terms of form and formlessness, or, as it is expressed mystically or theologically, spirit and form. To do so is to understand the fundamental characterological fact of manifestation, of phenomenology itself. Any form manifest in space and time is a product of this sedimentary drawing-down and recombination of energy.

That is not necessarily to say it is a teleological process. It is to say it is an active process occurring in space and time. It has produced technological advances, if you view an advance as something that furthers the possibility of perceiving the ontological, existential condition of being through forms. The opposable thumb creates a physical paradigm shift. The forebrain produces a metaphysical paradigm shift in terms of recursion. These technological artifacts are produced in space and time, and historically they have made available new terrain of experience and existence and opened critical categories for the interrogation of beings.

So when you look at that play from the level of ontological character, it has historically produced openings, existential apertures through which being might perceive itself, the human forebrain being the most fundamental as we understand it.

This technological revolution is what Shelley, in his later years, comes to understand as the most natural and essential: the revolutionary evolution of being, which cannot be manufactured in human time.

What is fascinating about technological modernity is that the exponential growth of technology has had little impact on humankind’s capacity to perceive at the level of ontological being. The beings who do perceive at that level are neurological anomalies of profound capacity, perceiving outside the gridlocked technology of the organism. That organism is, in many ways, grounded in its most base, primal, and primary faculties of survival and reproduction. These are the exceptional ontological geniuses of human history, as we have continually described them.

And so there is this veiling process of nature. When I view history aesthetically, or perhaps through its aura, as Walter Benjamin would put it, the aura of history, especially modernity, is shining an increasingly bright light on nature. With the technological advent of the forebrain, we are still in a very narrow band, a technological flash point that has existed for hundreds of thousands of years now.

But the increasing scaffolding made possible by tens of thousands of years of scientific innovation has fed into channel two technologies. It has quite literally brightened the atmosphere of human and ecological experience, as you can see in pictures of the Earth from above, and even in terms of the solar system or the Milky Way. There has been an energetic harvesting of latent potential, whether within the earth, within the air, or through replicating the sun and stars. It is now phenomenologically manifest as an experience I have called factory time, or, you could say, the light of digital screens. It is an enlightening, or lightening up, of the globe, of the ontological terrain, through channel two technologies.

Whether that actually produces species-level ontological awareness of being is highly doubtful, in my opinion. But you just don’t know. You never know. This is an entirely new experience and experiment in human history, insofar as we are aware.

So that is where I am with this, primarily. I’ll take it back to the beginning, to lila.

This project of the liberation of cosmic energy lies beneath and behind all human endeavor, effort, understanding, capacity, and awareness, because it is being itself seeking to become itself through the technological aperture.

This is what we experience in the scaffolding of human technological history, from the late nineteenth century through the twentieth and into the twenty-first. These advancing technologies are supposedly the cures for the ills of human history: human incapacity, incompetence, greed, corruption, lust, anger, and so on. These technologies are attempting to hold a mirror up to the primordial mirror, which is being in relation to beings.

It is a reproduction of the fundamental ontological problem: technological beings coming into relationship with being itself, with what they fundamentally are. Understanding beings as process, and accurately and adequately perceiving that process superstructurally in cosmological space and time, produces possible revelation and possible liberation. That liberation comes in and through the aperture perceiving that reality: awareness of the higher identity, or higher awareness of the superstructure of reality and of being in time.

This is largely made possible by the increasing perceptual acuity and high contrast provided by the innovations of Western, modern scientific history. It adds another layer to our ability to understand the intuitions that emerge through the Vedanta and the ancient Hindu mystical tradition, or through ancient Christian theology, or ancient Greek theological structures. These are mythological intuitions of the cosmological character of creation, as we discussed with Heraclitus.

This historical enlightening is manifest phenomenologically, in the light and energy being produced at a global scale. It is also manifest in the scaffolding of ontological awareness that runs from these ancient figures into, say, Spinoza, Blake, and Shelley. This is a sort of industrialization, technologization, and digitization of the ontologist. It is the etching of an increasingly high-contrast, real, superstructural vision of being. Ideally, if done properly, that vision applies across every scalar representation and manifestation of how being appears, functions, acts, and becomes in space and time, from star to cell.

So that’s what I’ve got. Again: nature is veiled, phenomenologically veiled. To take nature at its word is to fail to see the operative, superstructural principle and character at work behind it. And this can be understood simply by looking at and understanding the history of the universe itself.

Thank you.